Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Foster’ On HBO, A Documentary About Kids And Parents In L.A.’s Foster Care System

At the end of the fiscal year of 2017, approximately 443,000 children were in foster care in the U.S. Over 600,000 were in the system at any point in FY 2017. Child services agencies around the country are overwhelmed with case work, not only trying to make sure children are protected but placed with foster families that will care for them. Because the system is always in such crisis, the success stories are always buried in the news cycle by the tragedies. The new HBO documentary Foster tries to tell some of the positive stories from the system.

FOSTER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: HBO’s new documentary Foster is produced by Mark Jonathan Harris (Into The Arms Of Strangers) and Deborah Oppenheimer (George Lopez, The Drew Carey Show), and the two of them take a closer look at Los Angeles County’s foster system, where the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), one of the busier such services in the nation, try to protect children who are at risk and put them in the homes of foster parents.

Going through the foster system is tough for kids, of course; first, they’re wracked with guilt and self-esteem issues because their birth parents couldn’t take care of them, for one reason or another. But personality clashes, drug use, and abuse in their foster families cause many of these kids to go from family to family or spend time in group homes. Their sense of home and identity suffer greatly in the process.

But the film, directed by Harris, looks to tell some of the more successful stories at different phases of a kid’s life in the system. In one case, a social worker goes on an emergency call because a mother who was in labor tested positive for cocaine. After the baby is taken from their custody, she is eventually given over to the father under court supervision while the mother gets herself clean. In another case, a teen who has been in one group home after another is called into court because of an incident at one of his group homes. He had spent 25 days in juvenile detention and doesn’t want to go back. He does suffer from severe trauma, though, having seen his mother get murdered when he was 4.

Meanwhile, at UC-Northridge, an 18-year-old freshman who was born addicted to drugs and subsequently spent time in the system during most of her childhood (spending a few years with her abusive mother) struggles in school, which is common for people who were drug babies. DCFS actually has programs to help graduates of the system transition into adulthood, like peer advisers and placement in apartments with other foster kids (in this case, her biological sister).

We also see a current social worker who was in the system as a kid; she talks about how being in the system has informed her work, but also she now appreciate how tough social workers in the foster system had to work, and the massive caseloads that they deal with every day. Finally, we’re introduced to a woman who started fostering children after her first child was born; she has five foster kids, one of which has autism. She’s adopted a few of them, mainly because, in the case of her adult son, she helped him become more self-sufficient and live with cerebral palsy. In another case, a 12-year-old girl, she’s so happy in the woman’s house the idea of going somewhere else made no sense.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There have been other documentaries about the foster care system, like Unwanted, but Foster takes pains to show the successes instead of the tragedies.

Performance Worth Watching: Earcylene Beavers, the mother who has taken in hundreds of foster children over the decades, is the standout here, not only because of her compassion but because she has been able to see the reasoning why the kids that have come to her are often angry and lash out. “Once you take a kid away from its parents, if they didn’t have an issue before, they’ve got one now,” she says. That empathy is all the difference.

Memorable Dialogue: Listening to Jessica Chandler, who was in the system as a kid and now is a social worker for DCFS, speaks to a group of nurses who provide in-house support for low-income first-time mothers, and the harrowing stories of her childhood, ones that left her in tears, made the fact that she’s broken the cycle all the more remarkable.

Our Take: It’s hard to find fault with the logic Oppenheimer and Harris applied to Foster, but it felt like, despite the film’s 111-minute running time, we wanted a little bit more.

The pair don’t gloss over the issues facing DCFS agencies across the country, as evidenced by the massive amount of file folders that threaten to bury every cubicle in the L.A. County DCFS offices. The fact that the social workers, along with Children’s Law Center attorneys and lawyers assigned to clients by the juvenile courts have enough time to talk to and advocate for people like Dasani, the teen who was on probation for an incident at his group home, is almost miraculous. And seeing foster parents like Beavers, who empathize and care for her foster kids as if they were her own, is heartening.

But a bit more of a sense of what DCFS is up against would have provided a nice balance, maybe a way to show why the successes and positive stories need to be celebrated when they can. We’re not saying that the movie should have been a dirge of abusive parents and kids getting in trouble. We just wish a bit more context was provided.

However, the people Oppenheimer and Harris did choose were compelling because of their success, or in the case of Mary, the college freshman struggling to be on her own, compelling because they know that the road ahead will continue to be hard, but they’re strong enough to face it.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Foster needs a little more balance, but it’s a good treatise on how people can come out the other side of the overwhelmed foster system and do well.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Foster on HBO