The Lost Children of Wilder or Robert Moses and the Modern City

The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care

Author: Nina Bernstein

In 1973 Marcia Lowry, a young civil liberties attorney, filed a controversial class-action suit that would come to be known as Wilder, which challenged New York City's operation of its foster-care system. Lowry's contention was that the system failed the children it was meant to help because it placed them according to creed and convenience, not according to need. The plaintiff was thirteen-year-old Shirley Wilder, an abused runaway whose childhood had been shaped by the system's inequities. Within a year Shirley would give birth to a son and relinquish him to the same failing system.

Seventeen years later, with Wilder still controversial and still in court, Nina Bernstein tried to find out what had happened to Shirley and her baby. She was told by child-welfare officials that Shirley had disappeared and that her son was one of thousands of anonymous children whose circumstances are concealed by the veil of confidentiality that hides foster care from public scrutiny. But Bernstein persevered.

The Lost Children of Wilder gives us, in galvanizing and compulsively readable detail, the full history of a case that reveals the racial, religious, and political fault lines in our child-welfare system, and lays bare the fundamental contradiction at the heart of our well-intended efforts to sever the destiny of needy children from the fate of their parents. Bernstein takes us behind the scenes of far-reaching legal and legislative battles, at the same time as she traces, in heartbreaking counterpoint, the consequences as they are played out in the life of Shirley's son, Lamont. His terrifying journey through the system has produced a man with deep emotional wounds, a stifled yearning for family, and a son growing up in the system's shadow.

In recounting the failure of the promise of benevolence, The Lost Children of Wilder makes clear how welfare reform can also damage its intended beneficiaries. A landmark achievement of investigative reporting and a tour de force of social observation, this book will haunt every reader who cares about the needs of children.

New York Times Book Review - Tanya Luhrmann

. . . a brilliantly researched account of an attempt to make the New York City foster care system fair for all its children. . . . Its legal analysis is rich, but . . . the drama is human.

Ellen Goodman

Nina Bernstein's fine reporting is more like archaeology. She searched down through layer after layer to show how the foster care system failed children, one generation after the next. ``The Lost Children of Wilder'' is a brilliant reconstruction of all the problems illuminated by a long-running lawsuit that makes Dickens' Jarndyce v. Jarndyce look swift and just.

David Rothman

This book joins a powerful analysis of law as an engine of social change with the fascinating story of the lives of a mother and son caught in the web of foster care and child-welfare agencies. Bernstein captures all the import and meaning of a legal case that split the philanthropic and civil liberties communities like no other. The Lost Children of Wilder is insightful and riveting, illuminating both the political and the personal.

Alex Kotlowitz

Nina Bernstein has pulled off a remarkable feat of reporting and storytelling that pushes us to reconsider how we handle children who are without home or family. A disturbing and riveting narrative that should be required reading for anyone who professes concern for children.

Publishers Weekly

In this first-rate investigation, New York Times reporter Bernstein explores the genesis and aftermath of the landmark 1973 legal case filed by young ACLU attorney Marcia Lowry against the New York State foster-care system. Known as Wilder for its 14-year-old African-American plaintiff, Shirley "Pinky" Wilder, the suit claimed Jewish and Catholic child welfare services had a lock on foster care funding and placements. Like Susan Sheehan in Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair, Bernstein illuminates broader social issues through the story of Shirley; Lamont, the son she bore at 14; and Lamont's young son--all graduates of New York's hellish child welfare system. The tale is gut-wrenchingly Dickensian--all the more so because, as Bernstein shows, the well-meaning 19th-century Jewish and Catholic philanthropists, clerics and parents who founded and expanded the child welfare system in New York ultimately deprived huge numbers of children of their legal and human rights as the demographics of New York changed. It took 25 years and many more lawsuits before the reforms mandated by Wilder began to be realized. In the interim, Lamont endured the same excruciating experiences his mother had suffered, including physical and sexual abuse, homelessness, witnessing the deaths of other children in foster care and losing his own child to the foster care system. A crack addict, Shirley died of AIDS at 40. Despite these horrors, the book ends with the hopeful postscript that Lamont's son currently lives with his mother, Kisha, and visits his now self-supporting father on weekends. Ten years in the making, this viscerally powerful history of institutionalized child abuse and the criminalization of poverty, of civil rights and social change, is compelling and essential reading. Agent, Gloria Loomis. (Feb. 28) Forecast: Like Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities, this book has the potential to jumpstart a national conversation about the failings of our social safety net for impoverished children. If it garners the review attention it deserves, it will find a solid audience among readers of Kozol's and Sheehan's books. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This book is a fascinating history of 28 years of change in the child foster care system in New York City, where sectarian interests controlled the placement of homeless, neglected, abused, and emotionally disturbed children and adolescents. The book follows the lives of lead plaintiff Shirley Wilder and her son as Shirley goes from homeless preteen to teenage mother at 14 and is shifted from home to foster home to group home to institution. Her son grows up in foster care and institutions. The book simultaneously follows a 1986 federal lawsuit, which became known as Wilder, brought on behalf of foster care children in New York City by the ACLU Children's Rights Project. New York Times reporter Bernstein conducted extensive interviews of many of the participants for this book, which is compelling both for its elucidation of child welfare practices and for its demonstration of how litigation can affect social policy. A necessary purchase for New York State academic and larger public libraries and a very useful one for social welfare and policy collections nationwide.--Mary Jane Brustman, Univ. at Albany Libs., NY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

What People Are Saying

David Rothman
This book joins a powerful analysis of law as an engine of social change with the fascinating story of the lives of a mother and son caught in the web of foster care and child-welfare agencies. Bernstein captures all the import and meaning of a legal case that split the philanthropic and civil liberties communities like no other. The Lost Children of Wilder is insightful and riveting, illuminating both the political and the personal.
— (David Rothman, author of The Discovery of the Asylum)

Table of Contents:

	Introduction	xi
Part 1	1972-1974	1
Part 2	1974-1981	103
Part 3	1981-1983	243
Part 4	1984-1989	313
Part 5	1990-2000	369
	Postscript	443
	Notes on Reporting and Sources	445
	Case References	459
	Acknowledgments	461
	Index	463

Interesting book: El Nuevo Libro de Cocina Dietetica del DrAtkins con Recetas Rapidas y Sencillas or Harvesting the Dream

Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York

Author: Hilary Ballon

A fresh look at the greatest builder in the history of New York City and one of its most controversial figures.