“Not having a home for me and my son made it even harder to get out of survival mode and learn to connect to him.”
When I was 18 and became a father, I had no place of my own just to be with my son.
At the time, I was a youth in foster care. In my life I’d been homeless and slept on benches. I’d lost my mother and my cousin. I’d seen close friends die. As a Black male growing up in poverty, I’d learned that if I showed soft emotions, I would be seen as weak or crazy, so instead I shut down. I was emotionally absent as a father because I was afraid to fail and somehow harm my son without meaning to.
During those first few years when I was doing everything I could to be a good father on the outside, on the inside I was numb. I felt like I wasn’t even living. Not having a home for me and my son made it even harder to get out of survival mode and learn to connect to him.
Shortly after my son was born, I found a bed in Covenant House, a residence in Manhattan for homeless youth, even though I also had a place in a foster home on Staten Island. I went to Covenant House because the foster parent wouldn’t give me a house key. If I came home during the day and she wasn’t there, I’d be locked out, often for two or three hours. Now that I was a father, I didn’t want to beg to be treated decently.
I also went to Covenant House because the time it took me to travel from Staten Island to see my son was crazy. I had to travel around two hours to Manhattan, where I worked all day at Footlocker. After, I’d go to the Bronx to pick up my son, who lived with his mother. Because of all that travel, eventually I started staying at Covenant House full-time.
But I still had problems seeing my son. After Covenant House helped me get a second job working security, I’d work all night at a crazy stressful job (you’re basically a cop but with no gun or badge), and if the next shift didn’t show, I’d have to keep working, sometimes up to 16 hours. I hardly slept at, because right after work I’d go get my son.
But the worst part was that I didn’t have a place to be with him. My son’s mother was in a women’s shelter, where men aren’t allowed, and Covenant House and my foster care agency didn’t have any space for young fathers and their children. So for over a year, my only solution was to rent a room in a hotel in the Bronx. The cost was $80 for four hours or $200 for the day. I spent almost all the money I earned just to have a place for me and my son to be together.
I’m tired of young Black men being viewed as problems rather than as the backbone of our families and communities that we could be.
The city has recently started to pay attention to our struggles. This year, the mayor’s office increased funding for fatherhood programs and made them available for young fathers. (In the past, many programs were only for fathers 18 and older). Plus, for the first time ever, the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) is creating a fatherhood policy meant to protect fathers’ rights. I believe it’s a question of justice that ACS’s fatherhood policy includes language that removes some of the barriers that young fathers in foster care face—especially the barriers that the system itself creates.
Last year, the Center for the Study of Social Policy published a paper entitled “I Just Want to Be a Father,” which showed that a lot of young fathers in foster care don’t get any real casework or programs to help them grow into their father role. They’re disconnected from any kind of support and from each other.
Like me, many of them also don’t have a physical place to be a family. There are no group homes where fathers can live with their children full- or part-time or visiting spaces where we can be with our kids or hang out with our co-parents as a family. It’s left to foster parents to decide if they want to let the children of young fathers come over, and lots of times they don’t.
Many young fathers in foster care also have to deal with staff who require them to have background checks before they can visit children living with moms in group homes, and who require friends and relatives to have home visits and background checks before they allow young fathers in foster care to take their children to visit.
These practices basically cut off all options to young fathers in care other than to be out on the street with their kids. They also violate the official policies of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, but “I Just Want to Be a Father” found that they’re still common. The ACS fatherhood policy should make clear that these practices should end.
I began to get a little more connected to support when Court Appointed Special Advocates of New York City (CASA-NYC) assigned me a volunteer. The volunteer wasn’t a Black man or a father, but he texted me for six months before I responded to him, and that made me respect the strength he had not to fold under pressure. He taught me how to put on a tie and to speak up for what’s right. Over time, I learned that even when everybody is sitting down and no one is clapping, you can still stand up for yourself.
Instead of living in survival mode, I started slowing down and living in the present. Instead of going numb, I started accepting my feelings and channeling the pressure into something good. I also started playing more with my two sons. Today, we go outside. We read Dr. Seuss. We do puzzles together, because I want to teach them how to think strategically and look at problems as challenges that need solutions.
My volunteer also encouraged me to start attending CASA-NYC’s monthly group for young parents and its Youth Advisory Board. I was the first father to attend the parenting group.
Eventually I was hired to help run the group and to recruit more young fathers. In my role, I try to feel what other youth feel and create a safe space where no one is judging.
By sharing our stories with each other, we can think together about how to prevent what happened to us from happening to other youth. We can say to the city that fathers like us matter to our children, and that we and they should have the right to be together as a family.
Devante Grant is a young father of two, a former youth in foster care, and a youth advocate for CASA-NYC.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
