pdf ´ To the End of June » Cris Beam
Beam presents both a sharp End of Kindle #208 critiue of foster care policies and a searching exploration of the meaning of family Publishers Weekly starred reviewWho 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 To the PDFEPUB or the world of foster care looking into these uestions 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 familyThe book Fairly well written book about a heartbreaking subject abused abandoned and anonymous children stuck in the country's foster care system I read some criticism of the author's clear political bias Set aside the fact that the author is herself a child of abandonment and a member of the LGBT community how does one write about victimization and not have it come across as liberal minded This is about children who are often born victims and the trajectory their lives follow because of it I think than an agenda the author had an arsenal of facts first hand and otherwise that illuminated a system that is not only broken but continually being fixed by policy and decision makers who are themselves broken You have only to look at major and minor city streets littered in a real and symbolic way with loitering young people to know that what you're reading is true Some people characterize facts as agenda Worth reading There wasn't anything in here that was particularly eye opening but it was told in a relatively clear concise manner In the end I think the author concluded though she may not have come right out and said that this is a problem that will be around Until the 12th of Never And that's a long long time
Cris Beam » To the End of June epub
To the End of JuneN 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 belongingFocusing 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 chan This was a sobering book but definitely worth reading The author says she primarily wrote this book to be descriptive rather than proscriptive and that's accurate It's mostly just descriptions of interviews and experiences with foster children and foster parents and some social workers in the New York City foster care systemIn the epilogue she talks about how all these social programs food stamps foster care juvenile justice homelessness poverty in general are all interconnected She talks about how social workers either get burned out and leave low pay high stress long hours or stay and become hardened and disillusioned You can't blame them I felt ready to throw up my hands at the futility of it all after getting to know just a few foster kids in this book They enter adulthood under educated unprepared to manage their time or finances and with lackluster role models at best The majority end up homeless It's uncommon to find a case where drug or alcohol addiction isn't a factor It's just a big web of problems and even the best of intentions and interventions only seem to be putting a bandaid on a leaking dam I read this book because I might want to be a foster parent someday especially to teenagers who have never experienced the stability and unconditional love of a normal family This book definitely made me think twice about that although I have some years yet before I'll be in a position to make that decisionOn the upside I'm sure this book made me sympathetic to people in less fortunate circumstances than myself the deck really is stacked against them and made me want to hug my kids a little tighter and be a little patient Surely good things