Andrea Elliott

Invisible Child is a detailed but profound picture of the life of a young homeless girl and her family in NYC. There is so much wrong with the systems that are supposed to help lift people out of poverty. It's easy to sit on the sidelines and point fingers in every direction, but actually reading about one case among many clearly indicates that it's not that easy and the solutions are not at all obvious.
I am cheering for Dasani and her family, but it is clear that any progress they make show more towards change is due to hard work against unbelievable odds with little help from those who are in set up in positions to help. It seems that the most help comes from those whose lives intersect in other support roles and show kindness and understanding, often teachers and other people of the street or in poverty.
This book will not leave you unaffected. You will have an opinion, one way or another. It is a provocative read which I highly recommend.
My thanks to the author who gave up so much of her life to recording and sharing this story. You are an unsung hero in your own work, and I suspect were also a highly trusted and motivating force in the lives of this family. Bless you! show less

Powerful story of one bright, often-homeless child’s journey in NYC. “Don’t become a statistic is something Dasani hears all the time,” but she has very little control over that. She gets an opportunity to attend an intensive boarding school with its own dentists, doctors, hairstylists, etc. but brings her family ties and family trauma with her. As a teacher who fought her way out of similar circumstances, says: “She has what I didn’t have—all those young siblings,” the show more teacher says. “She has allegiance to them and that’s a problem, if any of them don’t see leaving as important.” The teacher worries about Dasani getting pregnant just to free herself: “It is easier to care for one baby than seven.” But even when that doesn’t happen, even away at school Dasani is bombarded with messages from home, seeing how her family falls further apart without her to be a substitute parent.

The book is good at explaining how the rules for getting help destroy other capacities, like everyone in a family having to skip school, work, and even court dates to stay all day at an intake office in order to get housing for that night. (After the NYT reported an earlier version of Dasani’s story, children no longer need to skip school.) As Elliott points out, when better-off families are in crisis, friends and relatives “drop off casseroles or make phone calls to doctors … because no family can properly function—much less attend therapy—when the electricity has been cut or the fridge is empty.” But caseworkers don’t generally provide food or transportation, just dictate that food should be provided and appointments for therapy/parenting classes made, or the children will be taken away.

The individual stories are mixed with statistics, such as that 20 percent of caseworkers quit family services after a year. “They often leave due to ‘burnout,’ a condition that is never applied to the children, as if they run on eternal flames.” show less

This book is nonfiction reportage on the life of a child and her family living in New York City and mostly homeless. It gives an understanding of the awful challenges faced by such children and the ham-handed efforts of political leaders and social service agencies to solve the problems that led to the situation. The author is both an objective reporter and clearly a sympathetic observer. I was deeply moved by getting to know this child and her family and understand their dilemmas. I read to show more the end, in suspense to find out whether the child and her siblings would stay in school and out of trouble. show less

As I read this book, I kept finding myself remembering different episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit which dealt with either the inability or unwillingness of the various iterations of children's social services to provide the meaningful help laws obligate them to provide. Of course, there are never enough staff and other resources but the losers are the children.

I appreciated the well-deserved opportunities Dasani received because of her spark and resilience. Yet I constantly show more wondered about the average child who lacks that special spark. The comedy of errors that came into play were truly sad. Real help didn't come until it was too late to help. Failed efforts by the father to get things fixed were blamed on him by those who were responsible to help him get them done. His pleas, his begging, the system for help went ignored until one of the children's schools complained. And then he got blamed that things were so bad.

It's like someone in a boat coming up to a man in the water clearly struggling and the person in the boat points out the direction of the shore and then leaves. The encounter ends with the person in the boat blaming the struggling man for drowning when the shore had clearly been pointed out to him.

Take aways:
- Children's services efforts cost significantly less when the goal is to keep families together than when families are split into the foster system.
- Children, on the whole, do better if the family is not split. As one psychologist said, children are amazingly resilient, even in poor situations.

The end of the book did leave me hopeful for Dasani and some of her siblings in breaking free from the system that trapped them as children. But on the whole in this country, I'm left with the idea that the only children who truly matter are the unborn. God help them because once they are born, those who insisted they be born will then blame them for being poor, blame them for drowning. show less