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Chapin Hall Researcher Shares Back Story of 'Reason, Season or Lifetime' Study
Gina Samuels
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It's not often that a scholarly study takes its title from pop culture. But the more that child-welfare researcher Gina M. Samuels thought about what to call her study of youth in foster care's social relationships, the more she kept coming back to the words in a poem that many youth cited when asked who the important people were in their lives.
"God brings people in your life ... sometimes just for that ... small season," said one young woman who is called Becky in the study.
"I love meeting new people all the time. 'Cause you know they make such a ... difference in your life, whether they're here for a season or here for a lifetime ... they're really here to give you something," said "Jessica."
"Realistically ... I'm thinking there's gonna come a point where, you know, people are in your life for a season, and the season is gonna be up one day," said "Condoleeza."
"The more I encountered the phrase, the more I realized that I'd seen it somewhere before," said Samuels, an assistant professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. "I started asking around, and nobody over 45 had heard of it, and everybody under 25 had seen it online."
It turns out that "People Come into Your Life for a Season, a Reason or a Lifetime" is the title of a poem by an unknown author that is widely quoted on the Facebook and MySpace pages of many 20-somethings. "Reason, Season or Lifetime" is also the title of the debut album of vocalist Kai Alece, and found in the title of numerous self-help books as well. In deference to the way the phrase resonated with the subjects of her study, Samuels titled her report, "A Reason, a Season, or a Lifetime: Relational Permanence Among Young Adults with Foster Care Backgrounds." The study was commissioned by the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative. "It is an important contribution to our understanding of how the circumstances and histories of older youth should shape our policies and our practice," said Gary Stangler, executive director of the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative. "The engagement of the youth in their transition out of foster care should be at the center of our efforts to connect them to families."
The 92-page report was released this spring by the Chapin Hall Center for Children, where Samuels is a faculty associate. The report is informed not only by Samuels' research and analytical skills, but also by her early-career experience as a caseworker and her own experience of having been adopted from foster care as an infant.
"My adoptive mom was a social worker at Hull House, and I grew up thinking highly about her and what she did," Samuels said. "I would meet people who were 50 who would tell me, ‘Your mother really transformed my childhood.' I thought it would be amazing to be able to have that impact."
Samuels got bachelor's and master's degrees in social work and first worked in an Afro-centric after-school program run by the Urban League. Then she got a job as a caseworker for the public child welfare agency in Dane County, Wisconsin. "It was really a formative experience for somebody whose life was affected by child welfare."
Samuels, who is biracial, had been adopted from the Illinois foster care system by a single, 42-year-old white woman in 1967, when Samuels was seven months old. "Many times, I had to tell my own story about a way of educating others," she said. "It became a powerful way of connecting with people around something they didn't understand. Often, the conversation would begin with them asking questions that were not harmless. ‘Is that your mother? Why don't you have a dad? How could it possibly be okay that a white lady is raising you?' This was in the middle of the civil rights era, and there was a lot of controversy developing around transracial adoption."
Samuels' experience led to a decision to specialize as a scholar in racial/ethnic identity and self-concept among youth and adults whose lives have been shaped by adoption or foster care. "I felt that I needed to study something that I could be passionate about and something I had a personal connection and commitment to," she said. Her dissertation for her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison was entitled, "Mixed Feelings: Stories of Race, Kinship, and Identity Among Biracial Adoptees."
Like many other scholars of adoption, Samuels believes that children who have been adopted harbor a sense of "ambiguous loss" that affects their interactions with others throughout their lives. Family systems researchers definite ambiguous losses "as those for which there are no clear boundaries, no clear ending, and often no societally recognized mechanisms or rituals for grieving or acknowledging what has been lost." In "A Reason, a Season, a Lifetime," she broadens the concept to include foster care.
"The concept is very well known in the adoption world in relation to the child's loss of his biological family," Samuels says. "Until now, it hasn't been used in foster care. But I find it a useful way to talk about a lot of things that happen for young people in the foster care system, from being taken from their biological families, to perhaps losing contact with siblings and other relatives, to changing placements and schools multiple times, to aging out of care and losing contact with foster parents or group home staff.. The realities attached to ambiguous losses not only damage one's sense of confidence in the ability to maintain close relationships, but one's trust in any relationship's permanence."
For the study, LaShaun Brooks, a data management coordinator at Chapin Hall, talked to 29 Opportunity Passport™ participants at four unidentified sites. All had aged out of foster care. Previous research had suggested that youth who have aged out of foster care are vulnerable to disrupted relationships and support networks.
Recruiting subjects for the study was challenging, Samuels said, even though participants were offered $100 for taking part. "It is a difficult population to track down and talk to,'' she said. Her interviewer agreed to meet them wherever they specified -- in friends' apartments, libraries, cafes. The interviewer asked each subject to construct a network diagram – a framework of three concentric circles–as a way of mapping their social connections. The goal was to get them to reflect on who was most important in their lives.
The good news is that almost all of the 29 young people put names in the inner, middle and outer circles. The disquieting news is that probing by the interviewer found that not everybody placed in a youth's inner circle would meet a conventional definition of a support. The sole name that one young man put in his inner circle was that of a former foster mother who kicked him out of her home more than a decade before.
After analyzing the network diagrams and interview responses, Samuels concluded that most of the youth had support networks and regarded adults as important sources of support. The adult support most commonly cited was a biological relative, with professionals – such as social workers or Jim Casey site staff – coming in second. "This study clearly provides support for the role adults can continue to play into the early adult years among this population," Samuels concluded.
Yet, many of the study participants expressed "a pervasive state of yearning to feel and experience a ‘home,' " Samuels reported, displaying "mixed feelings about the viability of their biological parents to both physically and psychologically provide this, and distrust in alternative or new relationships (e.g., adoption) as a way to experience a family and home where one truly belongs."
"At the time of our interviews, few young adults discussed relationships or family settings in which there was unquestionable permanence, belonging, and a mutually deep emotional connection," the study reported. "There is little in their stories to suggest that most have found emotional supports to cope with or grieve these losses over time. It is not surprising that they name emotional support as the most important but absent category of supports."
Among the lessons that Samuels hopes professionals will draw from the study is the importance of helping youth who have aged out of foster care build supportive relationships with their biological families. "They carry their biological families with them in various literal and symbolic ways throughout their lives," she said. "We need to get better at finding ways to help them make healthy choices about the relationships they're going to have with their families."
As for Samuels: Two years ago, she launched a search for her biological mother. "I had just never had an interest before, despite all this work," she said. "My decision to search really came from hearing from other people that it really is important. For me, it was much more of a ‘do I look like her?' issue than an identity issue."
It took just a few weeks for Samuels to find her birth mother. They met, and have continued to stay in touch. Samuels hasn't yet decided whether to search for her biological father, whom, she has been told, didn't know of her birth.
Here is the poem, "People Come into Your Life for a Season, a Reason or a Lifetime:"
When you figure out which one it is,
you will know what to do for each person.
When someone is in your life for a REASON. . .
It is usually to meet a need you have expressed.
They have come to assist you through a difficulty,
to provide you with guidance and support,
to aid you physically, emotionally, or spiritually.
They may seem like a godsend, and they are!
They are there for the reason you need them to be.
Then, without any wrongdoing on your part,
or at an inconvenient time, this person will say
or do something to bring the relationship to an end.
Sometimes they die.
Sometimes they walk away.
Sometimes they act up and force you to take a stand.
What we must realize is that our need has been met,
our desire fulfilled, their work is done.
The prayer you sent up has been answered.
And now it is time to move on.
Then people come into your life for a SEASON....
Because your turn has come to share, grow, or learn.
They bring you an experience of peace, or make you laugh.
They may teach you something you have never done.
They usually give you an unbelievable amount of joy.
Believe it! It is real! But only for a season.
LIFETIME relationships teach you lifetime lesson:
things you must build upon in order to have
a solid emotional foundation.
Your job is to accept the lesson, love the person,
and put what you have learned to use in all
other relationships and areas of your life.
It is said that love is blind, but friendship is clairvoyant.
For a copy of Samuels' study, got to www.jimcaseyyouth.org
