Andrew Bridge saw his mother twice in the 10 years after he was taken from her. It is his firm belief that too many children are taken from their parents prematurely, that more resources and creativity should be applied to helping fragile families recover and better care for their children.
He thinks that foster care in this country has become a punitive solution for these vulnerable families. Social workers get more praise and bureaucracies more compensation for "saving" children from potential abuse and keeping them in state care than for keeping families together. These social workers are, of course, concerned that if they leave a child in a precarious situation and something happens, they will be to blame. And families, meanwhile, are so terrified of their children being taken away that they do not rely on social workers when in dangerous situations. Bridge thinks much more can be done to help keep these families intact.
"For all our talk about family values," he says, "we really only mean certain families." Bridge saw firsthand what happens to vulnerable women in this or any city. "I saw my mother raped, slapped, disrespected in every way, in spite of her amazing power as a beautiful, intelligent woman. She made bad choices, yes, but there is a fundamental lack of respect for the mother-child bond in this country."
In his work as a lawyer for children's rights -- at the Alliance for Children's Rights, then as managing director of child welfare reform at the Broad Foundation in Los Angeles and more recently on behalf of children in Alabama, Bridge says he meets relatively few "monsters." What is far more common is the absence of compassion.
Bridge is critical of congregate care. It was with some satisfaction that he saw the closure of MacLaren in 2003, referred to in an editorial in this newspaper as a publicly owned "human warehouse where unwanted youth were physically and psychologically abused over months or even years."
He spent years representing children at the Eufaula Adolescent Center in southern Alabama, a facility that has also mercifully and -- thanks to Bridge's efforts -- been shut down. His next book, "Seven Days in Alabama," is about a group of boys, now men, who grew up in Alabama's foster care, state psychiatric and juvenile justice systems. ("Hope's Boy" begins with Bridge visiting Eddie, a boy who had been banished to a solitary cell in the basement of the facility with a mattress on the floor. The boy soon kills himself.)
