To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care Author: Cris Beam | Language: English | ISBN:
B009JWCRJC | Format: PDF
To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care Description
"A triumph of narrative reporting and storytelling. . . . Beam gives [foster children] a much-needed voice and does what too many adults in the foster-care system can't, or won't: She advocates for them." -- New York Times Book Review
Who are the children of foster care? What, as a country, do we owe them? Cris Beam, a foster mother herself, spent five years immersed in the world of foster care, looking into these questions and tracing firsthand stories. The result is To the End of June, an unforgettable portrait that takes us deep inside the lives of foster children at the critical points in their search for a stable, loving family.
The book mirrors the life cycle of a foster child and so begins with the removal of babies and kids from birth families. There’s a teenage birth mother in Texas who signs away her parental rights on a napkin only to later reconsider, crushing the hopes of her baby’s adoptive parents. Beam then paints an unprecedented portrait of the intricacies of growing up in the system—the back-and-forth with agencies, the shuffling between pre-adoptive homes and group homes, the emotionally charged tug of prospective adoptive parents and the fundamental pull of birth parents. And then what happens as these system-reared kids become adults? Beam closely follows a group of teenagers in New York who are grappling with what aging out will mean for them and meets a woman who has parented eleven kids from the system, almost all over the age of eighteen, and all still in desperate need of a sense of home and belonging.
Focusing intensely on a few foster families who are deeply invested in the system’s success, To the End of June is essential for humanizing and challenging a broken system, while at the same time it is a tribute to resiliency and offers hope for real change.
- File Size: 609 KB
- Print Length: 337 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0151014124
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (August 13, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B009JWCRJC
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #32,347 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #8
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Social Work - #16
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Parenting & Relationships > Adoption - #30
in Books > Parenting & Relationships > Adoption
- #8
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Social Work - #16
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Parenting & Relationships > Adoption - #30
in Books > Parenting & Relationships > Adoption
This book is a must read for anyone who is considering becoming a Foster Care Parent. It is also an invaluable book for those who are interested in Adopting a child. The author, Cris Beam does an extraordinary job of taking a very deep, thorough, as well as very compassionate view of both the personal experiences of children who have been in the Foster Care System, as well as the parents who have been in the Foster Care system.
You will enjoy the research and depth that the author goes into in understanding this very complicated, as well as important subject. This is a very well researched book. It dives into the historical view, as well as the current view of, what makes the Foster Care system work well, and what parts of it do not work well.
It reads like a "Training Manual" of all the ins and outs of what the actual reality of becoming a Foster Care Parent is, and what are the innate illusions.
The book is divided into three sections.
Part One: Catch. This part explains the intricate way in which someone may end up in the foster care system. It also addresses how a person can get into becoming a foster care parent.. How they are "caught" if you will. It also include in detail what happens in this first part of the process of becoming a child in Foster Care, as well as a Parent who wants to become a Foster Parent.
Part Two: Hold. This section explains the way in which children come and go in and out of the system. It explains how hard it is for a child in the system to learn how to assimilate into a new family, as well as what a new parent needs to KNOW about a child who has been in and out of Foster Care, and what their deeper needs are. It also explains the adoption process of a Foster Care Child.
Part Three: Release.
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