I enjoyed reading “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family and Social Class” by Robert Henderson.

Two things led me to this book. The first is that for the past few holidays I have participated in charity gift giving. The charity presents a gift wish list of items. Next to each item is a brief summary of the future recipient’s life situation. The summaries suggested difficult lives, or at least chaotic. Single parents, foster children, multiple placements, etc. I hoped that my purchase of toys and clothing could make a small dent in their holiday season.

The second thing that led me to this book was a statement a co-worker made a lunch about foster children. “It’s harsh, but sometimes a child that won’t be loved by his/her family is better off dead!” He’s prone to statements of this nature, but his dramatic take is to underline his key point: “Love is so important to a proper upbringing.”

I vowed to look around for a memoir by a foster child to triangulate these two items, and Robert Henderson’s book was perfect. I’ll jump right away to Robert agreeing with my co-worker’s key point. He wrote that he would trade all of his “1% success” if he could have had a stable loving family growing up.

His story is compelling because there’s a gritty reality in his clear writing. He lived with multiple foster families in greater Los Angeles, each experience making him more fearful of abandonment and more susceptible to trouble. There’s a certain cynicism in foster care among foster families, and he senses this. After he’s adopted, he experienced more chaos when his adoptive family breaks up.

His schooling suffered, and being largely on his own without parental supervision or guidance caused him to explore drugs, alcohol, petty crime, and fighting (“burnout”). It’s amazing he was able to pull himself together given all the trouble he got into. He credits the military with at last giving him the structure and guardrails to properly mature. He also used his eight years in the service to assess himself and take schooling more seriously.

When Robert realizes that the lack of love has caused such a void in his emotional life, it was overwhelming for him. A child’s self-worth and maturity comes from his/her parents loving guidance. This is both intuitive yet elusive. Robert writes: “I’ve met some well-heeled people who have attempted to imagine what it’s like to be poor. But I’ve never met anyone who has tried to imagine what it would have been like to grow up without their family.” His observation and perspective is authoritative.

Because Robert has gone from a life in foster care and the lower class to matriculation from elite colleges, he’s able to draw sharp conclusions about class differences. His classmates and their families and many of the “elites” harbor “luxury beliefs”, a phrase he coined which mean beliefs that confer the believer status, but inflict costs on the lower class. One example: defunding the police. Robert trots out a handful of other examples of luxury beliefs in the later chapters of his book.

Though many will focus on Robert’s closing chapters in which he discusses class and his own ideas about psychology, I will always remember his narration of his childhood and military years. He writes of clinging to the social worker who marshaled him between various foster homes, a woman who had become a steady figure. He writes of military discipline and its unceasing routine that was in stark contrast to his flailing childhood.

Finally, he writes about finding solace in the library, especially in the biography and memoir section. As a child he somehow managed to find books that spoke to his condition. Through these books he realized he wasn’t alone in his fears and struggles. That Robert is now closing this circle, by writing the kind of book he would have wanted to read as a young, lost, confused boy, is triumphant. ( )