January 22, 2021 by Robert Franklin, JD, Member, National Board of Directors
Here and here I criticized Naomi Schaefer Riley’s attempted takedown of kinship care (Quilette, 12/12/20). Riley’s piece was well below the standards of Quilette that usually produces reasonably thoughtful and thought-provoking articles. But her reference to J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy made me want to read the book, so I did.
Based alone on Riley’s quotations of Vance, I concluded that her citation of his case to criticize kinship care was seriously misplaced. After all, she admitted that he highly values his grandmother’s rearing of him during his adolescence. But, having read Hillbilly Elegy, I find that Riley’s reliance on Vance’s life with his grandmother to make her case against kinship care wasn’t just misplaced, but verges on the dishonest.
As an aside, let me highly recommend Hillbilly Elegy. It rates an A+ from me. Vance is that rarest of birds, a person who’s highly intelligent but without an ax to grind or a single point of view to convince readers of. He sees and articulates nuance, ambiguity and subtlety. He writes with deep love and compassion for the hillbillies in his family and among his acquaintance, but never hesitates to criticize their dysfunctional behaviors. His book is, in my opinion, indispensable to an understanding of the current-day U.S.
I find it impossible to believe that anyone – Riley or anyone else – could read Vance’s book and honestly come away with the antipathy and grave misunderstanding of kinship care Riley expresses. Time and again, Vance says, in so many words, that his grandmother saved him, saved his life, made it possible for him to become the successful, responsible, productive, happy man he is. In a book freighted with ambivalence, Vance isn’t ambivalent about that. But he never needed to say those things. They’re simply too obvious to conclude otherwise.
His grandmother and grandfather were poor and poorly educated. But they were endlessly kind, loving and giving to their grandson and his older sister. When the elementary-school-aged J.D. came home one day in anguish because a kid in his class demonstrated a greater knowledge of arithmetic than he could, his grandfather sat him down and, in a couple of hours turned J.D.’s defeat to victory. By then, he understood both multiplication and division and was head and shoulders ahead of the rest of the class. When he needed a calculator in high school, his grandmother spent $84 that she barely had to make sure he got it. Throughout, she made demands on him – to stay away from kids who smoked pot, to make good grades, to aspire for more – and enforced them.
In the end, Vance prevailed over his background, over a culture that, at every turn imbued him and everyone in it with the certain knowledge that he wasn’t good enough, couldn’t do the work, was destined, like so many around him, only for drugs, poverty, ignorance and maybe prison. He did so because of the grandmother who took him in when his drug-addicted mother and her parade of husbands and boyfriends proved incompetent to care for him. Every page of Hillbilly Elegy fairly screams the value, in J.D. Vance’s life, of kinship care. He’s the poster boy for kinship care whom Riley attempts to recruit to her campaign against it. Amazing, but true.
But, to those who know a bit about the foster care system, the book hints at far more. When readers see the lengths to which Vance’s “Mamaw” goes to make sure he doesn’t fall through the cracks in hillbilly culture, denies herself needed medication so he can have food, clothes and the necessaries of education, the question arises “Would a foster parent do all that?” The passion that Mamaw had for her grandson’s welfare is the stuff of family. Yes, many foster parents are devoted to their foster children and go the extra mile for them. But Riley is arguing for a policy change, and we don’t build policy on the foundation of the exceptional, we do so on what we know generally to be true. In the case of kinship vs. stranger care, the choice – kinship care – is both obvious and borne out by the science on children’s welfare. Hillbilly Elegy shows how that works in everyday life.
Then there’s the fact that foster care ends when the child turns 18, but kinship is forever. The age of 18 is a watershed moment in the lives of many young adults and, if they’re in foster care, it’s doubly so. Eighteen is the age at which foster kids, unlike others, suddenly find themselves without a roof over their heads, food on the table, running water, etc. unless they can figure a way to provide those things for themselves. Unsurprisingly, many simply return to the families from whom they were taken by CPS years before.
But J.D. Vance didn’t have to do that. Nothing about his relationship with his Mamaw changed when he turned 18. She was every bit as devoted to him as she’d ever been and would continue to be until the day she died. Again, some foster parents maintain relationships with their foster kids after the kids age out of the system and the adults are no longer being paid by the state. But most don’t and almost none do so with the type of resolve Vance’s grandmother showed.
And it wasn’t just his grandmother. His grandfather, an aunt and his older sister all played significant roles in caring for J.D. as he grew up. They did so because they were his family and none of them ever dreamed of not stepping up when the need arose.
It’s beyond astonishing that Naomi Schaefer Riley would attempt to use Hillbilly Elegy to attack kinship care. That book and J.D. Vance’s life are in fact among the most articulate and powerful arguments in favor of kinship care and against placing children in the care of strangers that we have.