For Keeps News & Events
Virginia's first lady adopts foster care
Article by Margaret Edds, Virginian-Pilot Columnist, Sunday, January 21, 2007
Modern marriages may not be forever. Families are.
For better or worse, the family we're born to - even when it rips, frays or detonates along the way - impacts outlook and choices well into adulthood, sometimes all the way to the grave.
Having spent much of the past year researching a book on my mother, who died more than a half-century ago, I'm acutely aware of how far and how long the tentacles reach. I was in my mid-20s before I began to have a clue how imbedded even a missing parent can be. Now, I can see her written all over my life's story.
That caused two items in the news last week - one chilling, one hopeful - to leap out at me.
One was a Newsweek cover story, warning that "at least 1 million Iraqi kids have seen their lives damaged by the war - they've lost parents and homes, watched as their communities have been torn apart by sectarian furies." Now, the article asked, do they stand to become "the next jihadists"?
If so, the long-range consequences of this folly could dwarf the present mess.
The other story, concerning endangered children closer to home, reported Virginia first lady Anne Holton's decision to spotlight the needs of foster children, particularly older teens. If there's a perk to living life in a political fishbowl, it's the ability to pick a cause and pretty much guarantee it a statewide forum.
For the next three years, while Holton and husband Tim Kaine occupy the Governor's Mansion, her cause will be young people stripped of the anchor most of us call home.
I can't think of a better choice. There may not be much any individual can do to calm the life of an Iraqi youngster, but we're less helpless - if we've a mind to be - when it comes to young people across town or down the block.
"I knew immediately when I was leaving juvenile court that I wanted to do something involving these children who tugged at my heart the most and were the most difficult to leave - especially the older kids," Holton said in an interview last week.
"There's a perception that these kids are more than anyone can handle. Some are challenging, but some are just dying to live in a healthy, stable environment."
Holton got to know dozens of young people with precarious life stories as a Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court judge in Richmond for 7-1/2 years. Daughter of a former Virginia governor, a Harvard Law School graduate and a former Legal Aid attorney, she resigned the judgeship soon after Kaine's 2005 election to focus on her duties as first lady and their three children, Nat, Woody and Annella.
She knew from the beginning that she wanted to keep an eye on Virginia's other children as well.
Dark-haired, smiling, speaking at a staccato pace, Holton outlined the need and her plans to address it. About 8,000 children live in foster care in Virginia. About half of those are 11 or older, ages at which it becomes difficult to find permanent homes. Meanwhile, about half of such older children live in group homes - some because they need careful monitoring, but others because there's nowhere else to put them.
Holton saw in her courtroom young people who were smart, but foundering - often because they were parenting themselves and sometimes younger siblings as well. Her dream is to link as many such unattached children as possible with adults committed to a long-term relationship.
She knows from statistics that kids who "age out" on foster care - reach the maximum age for services, somewhere between 18 and 21 - without a family connection are not going to do well. Many of them will be homeless, on welfare rolls, incarcerated or in some other institution within three years.
Researchers advise that a key factor - perhaps the key factor - in childhood resiliency is a strong relationship with a stable adult. "What better way to get that than family?" she asked.
With assistance from a steering committee and a $94,500 grant from the Freddie Mac Foundation, Holton plans to spend the next six months studying successful programs around the state and nation and creating a data analysis of Virginia's needs. Then she'll be ready to move to the next phase of her "For Keeps" initiative: actual proposals for turning a dream into reality.
Family, by her definition, means more than a roof overhead; it means someone "who's going to be there for you, through thick and thin, forever," Holton said.
That ought to be every child's birthright. For all sorts of reasons, some avoidable, some not, it isn't. The irony is that every time we secure a child's future, whether here or abroad and for far into the future, we help secure our own.