Keith's Blog

The worst vacations are the ones you had no choice but to take.

It started out as a simple project.  We just wanted new windows.

OK, well, maybe that isn’t so simple in terms of homeowner projects.  Windows are complicated and expensive.  But getting new windows shouldn’t end with being displaced from your home on a forced vacation.  Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself.  My point is, something else clearly had to go wrong to kick off the comedy of errors.  That “something” was the discovery of mold on the windows, a result of living for years with blown seals effectively erasing their insulating properties. Cold outside air meeting hot inside air means condensation, which means persistent warm moisture, which means mold.  

What do you do when you have mold?  Well, you call a mold inspector to see what you’re dealing with.  The mold inspector will help you find out what type of mold you’re dealing with and how alarmed you should be.  He or she will also look everywhere else to see where you might have additional problems.  In this case, we had “additional problems” in the attic and in the basement. Oh dear, the problems are multiplying.

For those fortunate enough to not know, the next step is remediation.  That’s when you call a specialized contractor to kill, clean, and otherwise decontaminate the mold on the surfaces and in the air.  They use a combination of tools and chemicals to do this, all of which are billed as safe for humans and pets. As such, we felt no need to move out of the house while this work was taking place.

“Sometimes you just gotta know when to bail.”

In the morning two days into the remediation project, three things happened in rapid succession.

1. Most of the members of the household developed slight headaches. 

2. We received a phone call from our dog’s daycare that she had developed a cough.  They feared it might be bordetella (aka “kennel cough,” a highly contagious canine illness) and asked us to pick her up.  She would not be able to return to doggie-daycare or boarding until 10 days cough-free.  Put a pin in that.

3. The cat, while at a routine vet appointment, started bleeding profusely from his nose.  He kept bleeding actively for about 20 minutes.

Any of these in isolation would be alarming, but all three happening within an hour of each other put us into Red Alert.  It became immediately clear that none of us, human or pet, could stay in this house while the work was taking place.  In fact, the veterinarian from #3 above recommended three days to let the house vent of potential toxins. 

That same vet clued us into a hotel in nearby Devens that accepts both cats and dogs (remember that pin I said to place above, we can’t send the dog to boarding because they think she might have kennel-cough, so she’s stuck in the hotel with us).  Within an hour, I had made a three day reservation and filed a short notice time off for myself at work.  While I scrambled to pack clothes and pet supplies, Stephanie bought a new medium-size dog crate to house our poor bloody-nosed cat during our stay.  Despite having two kids still in school and contractors still actively working in our home, the Morse family was officially going on vacation.  

Stephanie coined the excellent portmanteau “stayvacuation,” and it stuck.

Welcome to Devens, a place that definitely exists.

So, Devens, MA is a strange town, in that it’s not really a town at all.  It is the repurposed remains of a massive decommissioned military base, with some still-active National Guard grounds at its center.  Lots of fencing now dressed as decoration, unorthodox signage, and massive open fields.  It’s also a Superfund site due to some unfortunate groundwater contamination, which prevents any significant development from taking place.

Fortunately, it has a hotel.  Specifically, a pet-friendly Hilton Garden.  We checked in on Thursday knowing that the Devens Commons would be the sight we’d wake up to for the next four days, two of which would be school days. 

Poor Simba was not a fan of these accommodations, finding himself locked in a small crate with a litter pan.  Anti-anxiety medications took the edge off.  Ultimately, he’s an old cat, and while confinement was far from ideal, he could be left alone. 

The dog was a different story.  She would lose her fucking mind two seconds after being left alone in a strange room, even if we had room for a second crate, which we really didn’t.  Dog-owning parents know this dance, but turn up a difficulty with the hurdles of having to eat every meal out and still managing the school shuffle and work.  Either the dog had to be out and about with us, or one adult had to stay behind.  

To be honest, the next four days were a blur.  Breakfast diners, walking paths, a well-utilized hotel pool all featured prominently.  The highlight was a pool party hosted by family friends, which provided an entire half a day distracting us from the fact that we could not go home.  Unfortunately, I had to go with the kids myself.  We couldn’t leave the dog, remember?

Thus it was that Stephanie and I spent our 10 year anniversary living out of a hotel room, barely seeing each other.  

This was a moment, but all moments pass.  We stayed safe.  The kids played in a pool, Simba stopped bleeding, and Chocolate found her way back to good health.  A long weekend in small room didn’t break us.  Over the course of those days in a hotel room, the house ventilated and we came home Monday afternoon to a safe, mold-free home.

Or so we thought.

TO BE CONTINUED.

Shortly after graduating, I had a lot of thoughts on my educational experience.  Specifically, as I began to start working in an actual engineering job, I had thoughts about the ways I was prepared for the real world and the ways I wasn’t.

I came in with useful tools, like knowing how to generate a truth table for a logic function or how to work in a small group.  I also came in with an encyclopedia of useless knowledge, like how to calculate the cross product of two matrices, determine the Thevenin Equivalent of a resistor circuit, and calculate a Fourier transform by hand.  It made me wonder how many people had to switch majors because they weren’t able to grasp those latter concepts. How many would-be engineers switched their career trajectories because they failed to master unhelpful skills?

Engineering school should not just be boot camp for smart people.  The focus should and can be on teaching a trade, instead of layering theory on top of theory in an effort to induce a third of the student body to wash out.

The question that nobody asked, yet I feel compelled to try to answer, is “what would you do, Dean Emperor Keith, if you could design the course plan yourself?”

My awesome former classmate Kyle was able to find a course plan for BU Electrical Engineers in the class of 2008.  This was the year after mine, and I was in Computer Systems Engineering, so a bit of it was unfamiliar to me. But most of it was recognizable.  Also, it was bright pink; I’ve taken mercy on you, dear reader, and rendered it in grey scale. Here’s the starting point.

I posit that we can make it better, mostly by removing a lot of content.  I’ll try to justify each of my picks below, both in terms of why classes were cut, or they were not.  In some cases, I combined classes together.

To make life easier, here’s the finished product, which I’ll also post down below.

Non-Engineering Classes Kept or Merged

English Composition – Communication is a part of basic engineering competency.

Calculus (Merged) – I agonized over this a bit.  I think cramming Calc I and Calc II into a single semester might be aggressive, but if you simply focus on the essentials (basics rules of derivatives and integrals) you can create enough of a foundation for future calculus-based classes like Physics and Mechanics.

Differential Equations – Probably the most applicable topic to most engineering work in terms of higher level math courses.

Chemistry – This one’s on the bubble.  It’s not directly applicable to most forms of engineering unless you’re really looking to focus on material sciences.  But the Periodic Table is too important to skip.

Physics (Merged) – Cover mechanics (Physics I) and electromagnetics (Physics II) in one course.  There are future courses that go deeper into these topics, so keeping the material cursory.

Waves and Modern Physics – Way too important and interesting to skip.  I might be biased.

Non-Engineering Classes Scrapped

Multivariate Calculus – The most interesting portions of this class, partial derivatives and multidimensional integrals, are better covered elsewhere and aren’t even that interesting.  Plus I really hated this class. Again, I might be biased.

Introduction to Linear Algebra – I don’t know why this class exists.

Elementary Probability – This topic is interesting but had very little direct applicability to working in the industry.

All Non-technical Electives – This might seem controversial but I have a very specific idea in mind here for what this program can accomplish, and liberal arts electives get in the way of it.  If you really are curious about Eastern Religions, read a book. Read lots of books! But don’t make us spend our tuition money on it.

Preamble: Theory vs. Practical

Before I move on to changes to the core engineering courses, I wanted to address a fundamental question.  What amount of theory is necessary and sufficient? My gut wants to say “almost zero, stop worrying and learn to love abstraction.”  But I’m going to try to be balanced here.

Take Electric Circuit Theory as a case example.  The class is meant to introduce the fundamentals of circuit analysis and design.  It is incredibly important, but spending an entire semester studying only three passive circuit components (resistors, capacitors, and inductors) is a waste.  Spending most of that time doing hand-analysis of complicated circuits means you have less time to learn how to use the simulation tools that actual engineers rely on.  The goal with this, and all, courses should be to stay in theory for just long enough to build a fundamental sense of the physical and mathematical mechanisms at play, and pivot as quickly as possible to the next level of abstraction and automation.

ECT, as it is currently taught, makes this pivot far too late.  Making it earlier allows the course to be merged with Electronics, to introduce active components (diodes and transistors) into the mix.  Again, this can only be accomplished if the Electronics syllabus is stripped of the months spent doing pen-and-paper analyses of rectifiers and inverters.

Engineering Classes Kept or Merged

Engineering Computation – This is intro programming for engineers.  Essential.

Engineering Mechanics – Deeper dive into the mechanics side of physics.  This is what allowed us to merge Physics I and II. Add more design projects, though.

Intro Electromagnetics – The same as above but for the electromagnetics portion of physics.  I did not take this class so I can’t speak to its merits.

Signals and Systems – This class is beneficial because, at the end of the day, many fields of engineering can be abstractly thought of as “systems” to the point where Systems Engineering is a thing people can get a Masters in.

Senior Design Project –  A long-term capstone project is valuable and provides the closest approximation to what working in the industry actually looks like.  The name might need to change, for reasons to be made clear shortly.

Electronics and Computer Electives – I see these as the part where students begin to specialize in higher level topics of interest, some of which are graduate level classes, and many of which are project-focused. For example, during my time at BU the most relevant course to my actual career was a chip design project course, VLSI II.  At the conclusion of the semester, the professor told me that I was the first undergraduate to take it. I used to be proud of that, but now I just think it’s a shame.

Engineering Classes Scrapped

Engineering Seminar – This was a fluff class.  It wasn’t worth any credits anyways.

Introduction to Engineering – Same as above, this was a semester-long rotating tour of several electives and I’m not sure why it was necessary.

Systems Elective – As justified above, useful content should have already been covered in Signals and Systems

Technical Electives – There are already enough “technical” electives captured above.  This many is excessive.

Engineering Classes Added

Unfortunately, we can’t just fix the inadequacies present here by removal alone.  We also need to add some content.

Almost half a dozen of these classes have a strong coding requirement inherent in them, but none of them spend any time teaching you how to use a decent text editor.  This is the intellectual equivalent of giving carpentry apprentices a year of training on the metallurgical makeup of nails but forgetting to teach them how to swing a fucking hammer.  What’s more, you can’t be an electrical engineer in the 21st Century without having a firm grasp of build automation (“Make,” for example) and version control systems, but this topic is left to TAs to explain to bewildered students just to allow them to get through their homework assignments.  So I’ve added a course I called “How to program.”

I went through my four years at BU without using a higher level interpreted scripting language like Perl or Python to perform simple functions.  These are the power tools of the tech industry and every graduate from an engineering program should have some experience with them. So I’ve added a course called “Scripting languages.”

So, after all that, I’ll visualize the changes again.

Now, let’s condense.

Even after adding two courses, look at what we’ve got here.  You can fit this program into two and a half years.

This isn’t enough credits, of course, to net you a Bachelor’s Degree.  I’d love to live in a world where this is no longer important, that even electrical and electronics engineering education can be treated as a trade program.  A more compact and focused program could be utilized for either a lower-cost secondary education or a quick worker retraining program, both of which are desperately needed right now.

This is, of course, all just fun and games.  I’m not actual Dean Emperor Keith. I have no authority to make any of this a reality, and nobody who does really pays much mind to what I think.  But as far as thought experiments go, this was a fun ride. Thanks for taking it with me.

It’s blase and unoriginal for parents to complain about Disney movies constantly killing off parents.  But I’ve been seeing all these old films in a new light, watching them again as an adoptive parent with my children.  There’s a new flavor coming through, always present but previously imperceptible to me. The themes and messages present in many of these child-oriented films have a different impact on an adopted child, different both in scale and in kind.  Sometimes it’s makes a positive message more meaningful, and other times it makes the low notes more distressing.

The key point I want to emphasize is that a “negative adoption theme” and a “sad moment” in a movie are not necessarily the same thing.

I’m walking through the Disney movies I have personal familiarity with and re-evaluating them as an adoptive parent.  Some of these I watched as a child, and some of them I’ve watched recently. Obviously others are going to be missing, as my experience is not all-encompassing.  Did I leave out any big ones in your experience? Let me know comments!

Spoilers ahead if you care.

Cinderella

A loving single father dies in the exposition.  Our soon-to-be princess is left in the care of a verbally abusive and neglectful stepmother.  She lives in a house with two bullying step-siblings.

This is all sad in its own right.  But there’s a subversive theme here for adoptive children that you’ll see crop up a few places in this list.  It boils down to “man, Protagonist, your birth family was much better, doesn’t it suck that you lost them?” This is, to put it mildly, not the best message you want to put out there when you’re struggling every day to build attachment.

The distinction between “step child” and “adopted child” is blurry enough that we can trust kids to make the link.  Cinderella is consistently treated like a second class citizen in her new family, and winds up befriending animals to combat her loneliness.

The Little Mermaid

I’m sure if I were bothered to search for it, I could dig up an explanation for what happened to Ariel’s mother.  She is neither seen nor mentioned. But we see plenty of her father. Upon being defied, he turns violent, prompting her to run away from home.

And running away?  That totally works out for her in the end.  I want to drill in on this, because it comes up more tha once.  Foster children are particularly at risk for running away from home.  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019074091730720X

So, I get a little twitchy when I see “running away” as the solution to the character’s problems.  And once you see it, it keeps rearing its head as a recurring theme.

Beauty and the Beast

Everybody’s favorite film about Stockholm Syndrome, it turns out, doesn’t have a lot to say about the subject of family.

Addendum: the live-action remake did find it necessary to tack on tragic parental loss backstories for both Belle and the Beast, so knock that version down a couple pegs.

Aladdin

What’s most striking about his parents is their absence.  There’s only one brief mention of the fact that he is an orphan.  The movie doesn’t touch on familial themes at all. I mean, the Sultan seems like a decent enough guy?

Given how the rest of this list goes, a complete lack of adoption themes is not the worst possible outcome.  No news is good news if the rest of the news is fucking tragic.

The Lion King

Simba watches his own father die violently, and then is made to feel like it’s his fault by his murderous uncle.  He copes with this loss by running away from home, which (again!) turns out just fine for him in the end.

No to all of this.  And I say this knowing that it’s still my favorite Disney movie.  Sometimes the truth hurts.

Frozen

Good lord, Disney.  Both parents killed off, on-screen, before we even make it out of the exposition.  Is that a record? It’s a shame, because eventually the story drives home the immense value that sisterhood can have.  And again, the protagonist runs away from home in a state of emotional distress, which turns out fine.

Tangled

The protagonist is kidnapped from her birth family as a baby.   Her kidnapper assumes the role of her mother, yet is verbally abusive and neglectful.  The story revolves around reuniting Rapunzel with her birth family, but in the process she has to kill her aforementioned surrogate mother.  Oh, and she ran away from home to do it.

Read the above paragraph from the point of view of an adoptive parent and try not to cringe.  This would be one of the movies that falls into Venn diagram region of Not Overtly Tragic and Negative Adoption Themes.  It’s far from the saddest Disney movie out there, but I can’t think of a worse one for a foster child.

The Princess and the Frog

Tiana’s father dies off-screen after a time-skip from the exposition.  However, everybody seems to be coping healthily with it. The movie focuses primarily on internal development of the two protagonists.

This movie provides an illustrative example of how to handle loss, and family, just right.  The story uses family as a motivation for self-improvement, not as a plot device to build tragedy.

Inside Out

This film is actually founded in some pretty real cognitive science behind emotional development, which is probably why it’s actually used as a resource in some forms of cognitive behavioral therapy.  https://psmag.com/social-justice/a-conversation-with-psychologist-behind-inside-out

What I absolutely love is that, in this movie, running away is not the solution to the protagonist’s problems.  It’s seen as a catastrophic failure.  Something to avoid at all costs.

I give this one top marks even though ostensibly it isn’t even a movie about adoption, just for how gracefully it handles the theme of family and coping with loss.

Moana

Everything was going great.  Both parents make it through to the end of the movie intact.  A grandparent dies offscreen, but it is presented less as tragedy and more as part of a cycle using a reincarnation gimmick.  So far so good.

But then, we get Maui opening up about his past, telling the story of how his parents didn’t want him, and so they threw him into the ocean.

So close, yet so far, Disney.  Seriously, the one movie where both parents survive and you have to throw attempted infanticide out of left field.

Conclusions

I had to stop here because I realize I’ve embarked on a bit of a fool’s errand in that I haven’t seen every Disney movie ever made and don’t remember all of the ones I’ve seen well enough to comment on them.  I will note that it’s interesting that what’s probably the saddest movie in the collection I’ve reviewed, The Lion King, isn’t the one with the worst adoption themes; that distinction goes to Tangled. Likewise, the most uplifting movie about familial bonds, Frozen, doesn’t have the best themes for adoption; that prize goes to Inside Out, which oddly enough isn’t a movie that even touches the idea of parental loss.

As always I’m curious what you, dear reader, think about the topic.  Let me know in the comments.

This Make Magazine article is now two and a half years old, but I’m just getting around to really digging into it.  I put a pin in it because I was amazed at the ingenuity and innovation on display. Here we have brilliant engineers advancing a common goal with simple materials.  And I became a bit crestfallen when I realized this level of reuse would not find traction in the US.

I’m starting to wonder if the true enemy of efficiency is plenty.  Moore’s Law and automation keep pushing prices downward, while we continue to externalize the negative impacts of nonrenewable resource consumption, waste disposal, and pollution.

My local Makerspace had been hosting a Repair Cafe style event on a monthly basis.  I’ve noticed we’ve had a challenge getting traction on the concept. Could this be a symptom?  Why bother taking the valuable time to repair a plastic toy, broken tool, or damaged electronic device when a small sum of money can make the problem just disappear?

A disposable culture only works if you have the resources to support replenishing discarded goods.  Those living in poverty don’t have that luxury. But, neither does this planet. Interest in electric vehicles wane when gas is $2.00/gal, but every gallon burned still incurs an unseen cost.

My lament here is due to the fact that efficiency gains should never be so easily dismissed when we live in a world with limited resources, even if we’ve temporarily obfuscated that scarcity via low prices.  No matter how cheap goods may become, our time is finite.

If I want to replace the battery on my current smartphone, I have to remove the damned screen.  And to be honest, I don’t see this as some sort of underhanded conspiracy by tech moguls to push us to buy more disposable goods.  The market wants devices that are small, thin, light, and well-integrated. The market didn’t want devices that are modular and easy to replace.  In the end, we got what we asked for.

All this talk about “Families Belong Together” raises complicated feelings for me.

It’s not because I lack outrage at the humanitarian crisis that has taken hold at our border.  I’m not conflicted about that at all. No, I’m wary because the simple fact of the matter is, if all families were kept together, mine would not exist.

So, I had to do some serious thinking.  I want to be able to tell the activists marching in the street that I do agree that family separation as an immigration policy is abhorrent, without following a toxic self-reflective whataboutism back to myself.  How do I square my place in this debate with my place in a system that separates children as part of its mission.

To satisfy this contradiction, I had to think back to my training.  Yes, training. All foster-adoptive parents in Massachusetts have to attend a MAPP training course.  Stephanie and I did, and it is not an exaggeration to say that this program changed our lives forever.  Their mission is simple.

“DCF trains foster parents so they have the skills needed to nurture children who have experienced trauma and to work in partnership with birth families.”

This is a 30-hour series of small-group classes in which experienced social workers break it all down.  We learned about the legal complexities of the foster system. We learned coping skills, for yourself and your future children.  We learned about the wide variety of potential medical, education, and emotional complications we may face. We learned how to move forward as a family, together.  Throughout the process, one crucial fact was drilled into us: separation is deeply  traumatic.  As adoptive parents it becomes our mission to help our children navigate this trauma, and try as best as we can to pave the road towards attachment and permanence.

But, if we know the process is deeply traumatic, and we know the scars from that trauma will last forever, why does it happen?  The sole reason any child protective service intervenes so severely is to protect the well-being of children.  To save lives.  That’s the bar that must be cleared.  Otherwise we’re inducing lifelong suffering without cause.

The children who were separated at the border during this shameful episode?  They weren’t separated because their lives were in danger. They weren’t separated to shield them from abuse or neglect.  Depending on who you ask, they were separated to reduce the flight risk of asylum-seekers, to send a deterring message across the globe, or just to piss off the libs.  None of those justifications, not a single fucking one of them, clears the bar.

Children are separated in this country, by decree of the government, every day.  But the difference between a humane system and a cruel one is that the former does so when it must, while the latter does so when it can.

For three years running now I’ve been making Mia a scavenger hunt for her birthday to lead her to one of her presents.  I thought this year I’d actually show it off.

Each clue is in an envelope marked with a number and a letter.  We’ll come back to why later. The first clue, as always, is sitting and waiting on the kitchen table.  There are eight envelopes for her eighth birthday. I’ll probably break that pattern some time before her 18th birthday.

The clues are mostly written on pieces of green paper.  Because we had a bunch of green typing paper.

The first clue just says “fold me” in the middle, with some hopefully-unreadable lines written on the top and bottom reverse side.

Fold it just right, and you get this. She got this without any assistance! Off to a great start!

The second clue is written backwards, and requires the use of a mirror to read.

She hit her first snag here.  She kept trying to figure out what it said without using a mirror.  I realize that the idea of “mirrors make things backwards” might not be the first thing that comes to mind when a kid sees backwards writing.  And the clue is solvable without one, just harder. Mommy might have given her a little guidance to take the clue to the bathroom.

The third clue didn’t work out well.  My goal was to just tell her “try saying it really fast.”  I was trying to point her to “Dresser drawer in your bedroom.”  She figured out “bedroom” instantly and “dresser” not long after, but didn’t really put it together.  Also, I’m not sure she realized the big fixture in her room is a “dresser.” I need to make sure I confirm her vocabulary before designing these.

The fourth envelope just contained a single Trader Joe’s Chocolate Cat Cookie (for people)™.  The goal was to guide her to the pantry. This mostly worked, but we just moved to a new house and it turns out she had no idea where the nonperishable food was stored.  Apparently she thought I was sourcing her Chocolate Cat Cookies (for people)™ from the refrigerator.

Oops.  We had to guide her straight to the pantry door.

Clue number five was, I must admit, too obtuse.

I had to tell her that LINUX is a kind of computer (shush), which was enough to get her looking in the office.

The goal being to find the matching bumper sticker on my desk. With a little pointing, she figured it out.

This clue envelope contained a single Uno card.  She got this right away, it was pointing her to the board games shelf.

It took, however, a surprising amount of time for her to find the actual envelope.

In general, I’ve been trying to frame these puzzles as a way of emphasizing the extraordinary progress she’s made in school the past couple of years.  The 6th birthday treasure hunt was a lot of pictures, but this one had more actual reading involved. With the penultimate clue, I really leaned into it, because now she can do basic arithmetic!  

She crushed it.  Decoded, it spells “BEANBAG,” a clear direction to the bean bag chair she sits on in front of the TV.

The final clue was just the numbers 1 through 8, written in circles the same way they appear on the envelopes.  This was a new gimmick: the envelopes as part of the final clue. But, this was too vague. She never had to keep track of the envelopes before, and her first instinct was to discard them.  This goes to a consistent issue she had with the game; she wanted to move fast, but the game was forcing her to slow down.  Perhaps a present is too strong of a motivator. It was actually causing her visible anxiety to stop and re-order the envelopes numerically to get the clue.

She did, however.  The letters spell out “WASHDISH,” leading her to the dishwasher for the actual present.  I spelled it that way because I was worried that if I spelled it “DISHWASH,” she’d 1) figure out the letters were spelling a word, 2) find 4 envelopes, 3) realize they spelled DISH, and 4) go straight for the dishwasher and bypass half the game.  This was over-thought; as I mentioned, she didn’t even get past #1. But I still think it was worth it.

The ultimate reward for this tireless treasure hunt was: a build-it-yourself robot toy!  Which apparently wasn’t exactly at the top of her wish list.

Parenthood.  You win some, you lose some.

I drew inspiration to write this after listening to two excellent podcasts.  

On an older episode of Pod Save the People, the hosts discussed a New York Times story detailing racial disparities in how child protective services were being utilized (Skip to 0:10:50).  Embedded in this discussion was the fact that the number of calls to child protective service agencies seems to be increasing in recent years.

On The Weeds, the co-hosts were analyzing a whitepaper that detailed the potential impacts on shoplifting that can be realized by changing the way welfare benefits are delivered (skip to 0:58:00).  Ezra Klein had to take a moment from an otherwise technical conversation to stop and reflect on a grim implication.  Some of these benefits are for children.  And caregivers are stealing food to feed them.  It reminded me that sometimes it takes effort to make the connections between policy and impact, but those connections were always there, waiting to be found.

I decided to try to dig into some data to figure out if there is a current trend in child welfare in terms of foster care and adoption programs.  This let me to the US Department of Health and Human Services website, which allowed me to download source data for 2011-2015 for a few meaningful statistics.  I had to manually sum together state-level info from that site to create these charts, which show nation-wide stats.

I’m not going to claim to have invented the idea that issues are complicated, intertwined things.  Everything is connected.  But over this past year I’ve been seeing the issue of child welfare front and center in everything I observe, and it has been startling.

We’re faced with a crisis in two forms.  We seek to reduce the number of children entering the foster system, and we seek to get those in the system adopted into permanent homes.  This appears to be a problem of related rates, of input versus output.  Certain forces impact the flow of children into the foster system, and other forces impact the rate at which they are pulled into permanency.  These dual challenges have very different root causes and possible solutions.  The numbers show that we’ve got space to do more on both.

The Supply Side

Every tragedy, big or small, has a chance to produce a new foster child.  

For example, take the fact that we’re suffering through a nationwide opioid epidemic.  Think about the staggering numbers of deaths and addiction rates we’re seeing, and ask yourself, what percentage of those are parents?  How many of those households have kids in them, and how many of them are about to attract the attention of child protective services?  I suspect, with a lag, we’re going to see the number of new foster children spike, with the worst impacts being geographically concentrated to areas hit particularly hard by this crisis.  Unfortunately, the HHS data stops at 2015, so I cannot back this up yet.  Let’s just add that to the list titled “Unpleasant Opioid Stats We’re Not Looking Forward to Seeing Next Year.”

These kids are the tragic amplifiers, impacted by every social and political injustice conceivable.  Every new addiction, every overdose, every eviction, every bankruptcy, every untreated mental illness, every lost job, every prison sentence, every deportation, every catastrophic weather event, every violent crime.  All of them have a feasible path that ends with a child in the system.  

And then they do find permanency?  They find themselves carrying traumatic loss but living in a world that stigmatizes mental health issues.  This is a difficult burden to take on.  An unfortunately non-zero number of parents will choose to “disrupt” an adoption after a placement, for whatever reason, putting the child back into the foster system.

There’s a darker side here too, where the threat of separation is weaponized against people of color and those living in poverty.  “Sure, you can call the health department, but I could call child services about the conditions your child is living in.  Your move.”  As an adoptive parent I have a lot of complicated feelings here.  How many of these children did not actually even need to be removed in the first place?

The Demand Side

I’m going to speak from personal experience when I say that adopting a child is not easy.  Nor should it be.  But that difficulty thins the pool of prospective adoptive parents.  Massachusetts makes a series of concerted choices to take finances out of the equation.  Our state provides intensive training and post-adoption support services to guide parents through the process.  Adoptive parents can qualify to keep their stipend and continue Medicaid coverage.  And foster children in Massachusetts get free in-state tuition, whether they were adopted or not.  

These are incentives to encourage and enable adoption, by taking finances out of the parents’ decision-making.  And they are expensive.  States that are not so generous with taxpayer dollars, states like to tout their low tax burden, are not going to have such incentives to offer.

Stepping back, in terms of state and federal policy priorities, the most obvious knob is straight up funding for child welfare services.  This puts our legislatures in a position to set the priorities of these services in terms of funding.  Underfunded and understaffed departments won’t be able to keep up.  

Moreover, these kids are going to need services.  They tend to enter the system with physical, psychological and developmental complications far beyond their typical peers.  But education is also a major funding sink for local and state governments.  Public school budgets bear the burden of special education needs, as they carry a mandate to provide services to children who need them.  Private schools are under no obligation to provide such services.  What happens to that budget when we start picking away public school funding for voucher programs?   Public schools will struggle to provide services, and adoptive parents will struggle to make due without.  

And what about health care services?  These kids can’t get on their parents’ plan because while they are in foster care their legal guardian is the state.  So the state foots their bills; in MA, for example, they get Medicaid.  But Medicaid funding is clearly not immune to politics.  If it suffers, so do they.  Cuts to budgets will impact reimbursement rates, and those rates drive the number of providers offering their services.  If you don’t believe we, as a nation, would ever endanger funding for children’s health care, I’d refer you to the fact that we’re already doing so.

Too often, when we talk about the welfare state, our conversation focuses on personal responsibility.  On individuals who find themselves dependent on the government because of personal choice.  Dead beats.  Welfare queens.  Well, the real welfare queens are actually princesses, and they didn’t seek this lot.  These children provide the most lucid justification for the social safety net.  The free market?  The invisible hand?  It doesn’t give a shit about them, whether they can eat, see a doctor, go to college, or find a safe forever home.  It’s up to us, the public, to decide how to react to this situation.

Our policy decisions in this area revolve around creating an incentive for prospective parents to adopt a child by ensuring a certain level of support.  The robustness of these support structures will determine the strength of the incentives generated.  Every policy choice even tangentially related to child care will have an impact on the number of families willing to make this commitment.  

What Do We Want?

Let’s take a moment to step away from details and get purely idealistic.  Look back on those two graphs.  The number of children entering foster care should be vanishingly low.  And the number of adoptions should hold at a level to cover the removals that were truly unpreventable.  That’s a close to a perfect world as we can get.

I’ll acknowledge that our world is far from perfect.  But these ideals should form the foundational principles of what we wish to achieve.  A moral compass that we shouldn’t lose sight of.  Because if we look hard enough, we can find connections to these goals wherever we look.

Everything you think that matters flows down into this.  Whether it is a crisis driving the swelling ranks of children removed from their homes, a support structure that could have been in place to mitigate it, or a challenge these children face on their path forward, every issue trickles down to them.  These young people, who have had so little agency over their own fates, are depending on us.  Let’s choose carefully.

Remember that post I had earlier detailing the creation of a video game control panel?  And how it was a standalone component of a much larger system?  Well, that system is coming along nicely.

Forward: Those who are interested in a more complete slideshow of pictures can check out this Dropbox album, which contains a full dump of all the photos I took over the three (!) years I’ve been tinkering with this thing.

As before, I’m going to lead off with accolades.  By no means did I undertake this project alone.

• Jack Walsh, James Saunders, and Steve Birmingham – How to cut shit on the table saw without murdering myself
• Bill Taylor – Jigsawing for dummies
• Samuel Green – Woodworking supplemental and replacement work
• Jason M’Sadoques – Debugging, build help, general slack picking-up
• Mike Rushton –  Raspberry Pi expertise

Last but not least, www.arcadecab.com for the step-by-step instructions.  This site was invaluable.  It broke down the process from sourcing parts to assembly, and I’m not sure how I would have gotten this far without it.  For reference, we used “Cabinet Plans 2.”

So, we start with three lovely plywood sheets.  Two of these are used almost entirely for the sides.  I cut out the shapes with a jigsaw and some fences to keep the lines straight.  Despite being one of the very first steps I undertook, I think this is the phase that still gives me the most pride in how it turned out.

The remaining plywood gets cut into varying rectangles to form the shelves, top and back panels, and the base.

The important thing to remember about an arcade cabinet is that with modern technology where it is, the internals are going to be almost entirely empty space.  The form factor is important to create both a shelf for a screen at eye level, and a place to hold a control panel at waist level.  The remainder of the panels enclose the unit, and from these it’s all just a game of aesthetics.

Getting the base in seemed easy, since there’s a slot for it.  But I’ll be damned if Sam and I could figure out a graceful way to fit a screwdriver (let alone a power drill) in at a usable angle to attach the base to the ledger boards on the side.  And this played out most of the pieces, the angles were just awful.  From what I can gather, this plan from arcadecab.com was meant to show as little external hardware as possible.  As a beginner in woodworking, I probably shouldn’t have considered this important, and found a different way to attach these things.  But it’s done, mostly with significant amounts of elbow grease and Hail Mary pre-drilling.

The base sits on casters to make the thing easier to move.  Seems like this would be optional, but during the construction phase it was rolling in and out of its various temporary homes constantly.  Being able to do so was a major energy-saver.

Choosing a screen turned out to be a source of great consternation for the group.  A CRT TV would provide the proper aesthetic, but comes with a much higher weight and takes up much more space.  The bigger issue, however, was actually getting the maximal size.  Pythagoras informed me that based on the widths I had cut, we could fit a 25” television, but that turns out to be hard to come by.  In the end, we compromised with a 19” LCD monitor with a wooden bezel for the time being.  With the half-back construction and removable panels, retrofitting a CRT is still possible down the line.

The control panel itself is pretty much stand-alone, and simply outputs a USB cable.  After all of the pieces were assembled, the challenges moved quickly from woodworking to software.  We are currently using a Raspberry Pi Model 3 running the “Recalbox” image, a Debian-based distribution pre-configured with frontend and backend utilities to emulate a variety of gaming systems.  The control panel mimics a keyboard, so configuration was fairly straightforward once the buttons were properly wired up.

A set donated speakers (thanks Mike!) provide audio, and simply plug into the 3.5mm output jack on the Pi.  I plan on adding some grills here to improve the overall aesthetic.

There’s still much to do, especially in the way of decoration.  Plus, Recalbox likes to crash a lot at the moment, so additional debugging will be necessary.  But this is an accomplishment I think we can be proud of.  I certainly am.