“The members of the Casey family have from the beginning intended that the principal purpose of the Annie E. Casey Foundation would be to support needy children in foster homes,” Jim Casey wrote around 1947. Casey, who founded UPS, was worried about impoverished children, particularly orphans. He set up his foundation in 1948, and as of 2023, the endowment was valued at $3.4 billion.
Though he noted at the time that “the Foundation does not support care for children as its exclusive purpose,” it is clear the organization has moved quite far from its core mission. (Philanthropic watchdog Martin Morse Wooster’s account is instructive.) Some of this was done transparently, with board members saying they thought it would be better to focus on other groups of kids, like those who dropped out of school. Some of it was simply the result of the liberal drift of philanthropy. (Support for NPR or ACORN was probably not on Jim Casey’s bingo card.) A new book by the head of the foundation offers a window into not simply the politics but also the intellectual downward trajectory at the heart of the foundation’s activities.
Thrive: How the Science of the Adolescent Brain Helps Us Imagine a Better Future for All Children by Casey president and CEO Lisa M. Lawson is offered as a blueprint for how we can make sound decisions about policies related to children. Lawson, who has no special expertise in this topic beyond having birthed a daughter and working at UPS, presumably used the vast Casey staff to assemble the pages of factoids presented here.
Take, for instance, the claim that 7.3 million children in this country are not getting enough to eat. “What happens when a teenager or young adult is hungry and there is no food to eat?” Lawson asks. She notes that these circumstances increase anxiety and depression and cause low test scores in school. But in reality, what happens is that either their parents or a government safety net program provides them with meals. There’s no mention of the obesity epidemic in Lawson’s account. Instead, she mentions that 41 percent of college students at four-year institutions experience “food insecurity.”
What is food insecurity exactly? Lawson doesn’t define it. But according to the USDA it’s “the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways.” That pretty much opens the door for anything. Is it socially acceptable to go to a soup kitchen or use food stamps? What about going to Taco Bell? Eating leftovers?
Lawson wants to expand our definition (and the foundation’s) of who needs help, while also reducing it significantly. She worries, for instance, about the 42 million Americans who don’t have access to broadband in their homes. Though almost all students have smartphones and devices provided to them by their schools, as well as access in public places like libraries, for Lawson they are not having their “basic needs” met. Everything is couched in whether “children of color” experience such deprivations disproportionately. She doesn’t mention that black children and poor children spend disproportionately more time on screens, and that this probably has hindered their academic progress.
She also mentions the basic need for safety, as well. She offers thoughts on gun violence in neighborhoods, which “puts young people in a fight-or-flight mode.” It is odd, though, that for a foundation that is supposedly devoted to helping kids who are in foster care, she never mentions safety from child abuse. Nor does she mention that “children of color” are disproportionately likely to experience such abuse and even die from it.
In addition to bogus or meaningless or missing statistics, there are a lot of appeals to “brain science” in Thrive. There is even a diagram of the brain to show that adolescents are not fully in control of their decisions. “Don’t be mistaken—while a young person may look nearly grown their physical appearance does not correlate with their level of cognitive maturity.” Again, though, “children of color are more likely to be mistaken for an adult years before they actually are, a process called adultification that can have devastating effects.”
Lawson also relies on the concept of ACEs, that is, “adverse childhood experiences,” to explain how much trauma children have these days. This idea was originally intended for a small professional audience to discuss ways that different kinds of occurrences—from parental divorce to sexual abuse to poverty—might affect children’s outcomes. But the “score”—the number of ACEs a child experiences—is now used like taking someone’s temperature or blood pressure to figure out exactly how traumatized they’ve been, what kinds of negative things we can expect in their future, and how we have to treat them differently as a result. Lawson, of course, makes no mention of the various critiques of this measurement tool (including by some of the folks who launched it), instead just adding more pseudoscientific terms like “toxic stress” to describe how children might react to these circumstances.
To combat all of these problems, what children need are more resources. She writes that most of the removals of children to foster care are done because of parental neglect, rather than abuse. She notes that “most often” neglect is “defined as the failure to provide a child with needed food, clothing, shelter, medical care or supervision.” While she is correct that poor families tend to demonstrate these problems more, there is no evidence that the reason they are failing to provide is that they are poor. The truth is that we have safety net programs to provide all of those necessities to children and families. But if parents are unwilling or unable (because of drug abuse or mental illness, most often) to access those supports, then authorities need to intervene. Lawson’s suggestion that children are being removed simply “because a refrigerator is empty or there is no heat” should be offensive to the many people working in child welfare agencies today.
Lawson acknowledges that vulnerable kids need more human supports, not just material goods. She is a big advocate of mentorships and expanding the relationships with extended family for kids in foster care. But she also weirdly keeps coming back to the idea that we need to be more “efficient” in the way we give stuff to these families. When she first took on her role at the foundation, Lawson “realized that things were much different in the systems designed to serve children and families compared to the high-functioning corporate system designed to move packages.”
If a Republican had said this, he or she would be roundly (and rightly) mocked. Meeting the needs of children and families is a lot more complex and varied than delivering packages. And the goal should not actually just be efficiency. Making it as quick and reliant on automated technology as possible will mean that children and parents have less human contact, not more. This is not what vulnerable children need.
The other way in which Lawson’s experience at UPS has apparently shaped her view of how to care for at-risk youth is that “UPS would never have survived as a company being reactionary. That would be like taking the most care and concern with customers only after losing their package.” That’s why the Casey Foundation supports a “prevention approach.” In the past several years, Casey and almost every other private donor and public agency have doubled down on “prevention.”
The Family First Prevention Services Act, for instance, pushed hard by Casey and signed during the first Trump Administration, gives states more flexibility to use federal dollars for prevention services. Unfortunately, very few of those dollars have been used because there are not a lot of evidence-based programs to prevent kids from entering the child welfare system or being removed to foster care. Anger management and parenting classes have limited impact, for instance. And the idea that expansion of the safety net programs will accomplish this has almost no real research to support it.
Meanwhile, the things that actually do tend to improve childhood outcomes, like having married parents or involvement with strong religious institutions, don’t make it into Thrive. (It’s striking that one of Jim Casey’s earliest gifts was to the Seattle Archdiocese, but it doesn’t seem that supporting faith-based institutions in their quest to help kids is on the current Casey agenda.)
And we should not expect any of this to change. Casey is not only committed to its materialist idea that more money is the key to solving what ails families. Lawson and her colleagues seem largely unable to sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to research and “science.” In order to decide on policies for adolescents and teens, they want to just ask the teens—”platforming lived experience” in today’s social science parlance. But if, as Lawson informs us, “every adult was once an adolescent,” maybe we can just ask some older people for help too. With billions of dollars to give away, a little adult supervision might be in order.
Thrive: How the Science of the Adolescent Brain Helps Us Imagine a Better Future for All Children
by Lisa M. Lawson
The New Press, 222 pp., $28.99
Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women’s Forum, is the author of No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives.
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