A CHILD OF THE SYSTEM

NEW YORK - Twenika Huddleston remembers climbing with her little brother
into a car with a City of New York logo, then watching out the back window
as her mother, a crack cocaine addict, slowly walked away. Even eight years
later, at age 20, she still can close her eyes and replay the moment that
broke her heart: her mother turning just in time to wave goodbye.

She cried when she arrived at a holding center jammed with new foster
children. She cried when she learned there was no foster home in all of New
York with space for a brother and sister. She cried when workers found a
home for her brother, and took him away. And she cried again when workers
took her to the last available bed in the nation's biggest foster-care
system - in a group home for unruly teenage girls. And that was only day
one. Twenika Huddleston remains in the system today - after six foster
homes, two group homes, two brief jail spells, long absences as a runaway,
multiple failed reunions with her mother and now a "trial discharge" in her
own apartment. No longer simply her mother's daughter, she is a child of
Mother Government, a mother no child could love but who, on the other hand,
doesn't have the option to walk away.

The story of child welfare in America is told almost exclusively in terms
of horror stories, including these from last year:

"Girl, 4,Was 2nd Sibling to Die in D.C. Man's Care"; "Md. Man Charged With
Abuse After Death of Toddler"; "A [Cleveland] Child Starves to Death -
Why?"; "[Brooklyn] Girl, 2, Slain for Crying"; "[California] Mom Sought in
Drug Death of Infant."

This sea-to-sea procession of little corpses carried from homes deemed safe
by child-welfare authorities has ignited public anger at government for
failing to protect children.

In response, Congress and President Clinton enacted a sweeping adoption law
in November that, its champions say, will remove more children from harm's
way - not just into foster care, but into adoption, beyond the reach of
abusive or neglectful birth parents.

Yet beyond the heart-rending deaths and Washington oratory stretches a
problem whose scope and complexity defy the notion of a legislative fix.
While the new federal law and many similar state laws demand more
aggressive action from the nation's child-protection agencies, efforts of
these agencies increasingly are compromised more by overload than laxity or
ineptitude, according to extensive interviews with children's advocates and
caseworkers.

Through foster care, the government is now a mother of last resort to a
record 502,000 children nationally, almost double the number in 1980.
Federal spending on foster care has increased sixfold since then, even
accounting for inflation, making it the country's fastest-growing
entitlement program. Reports of child abuse and neglect have quadrupled
nationally since the late 1970s - with 969,000 confirmed cases counted in
1996 by the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse. The numbers suggest
a strain of social distress that runs counter to downturns in violent
crime, teenage pregnancy and welfare dependency.

The Washington Post examined the escalating pressures on the nation's
child-protection system through the stories of a foster child in New York,
a caseworker in Cleveland and a longtime drug addict in Maryland who spent
years trying to free her children, and herself, from the system.

Twenika Huddleston's story, reconstructed through extensive interviews and
her seven-volume case history made available by New York authorities, with
her and her mother's permission, illustrates a Herculean - if mostly
hapless - effort by the government to replace a mother in the life of one
child.

Education specialists, psychologists, psychiatrists, caseworkers,
bureaucrats - all had prescriptions for managing this increasingly unruly
girl, most of which either backfired or went unheeded as she was shuttled
between group homes and foster homes.

Meanwhile, costs mounted until they ultimately exceeded $100,000 for
housing, feeding and clothing this one child - not counting weekly
psychotherapy and services such as career counseling, according to New York
records.

When Twenika became a mother at 16, Mother Government became a grandmother,
providing for her daughter as well.

For all these voluminously documented efforts, Twenika felt perpetually
lost, seeing herself as no more than a biweekly check to various foster
parents - "In I come," she would say, "and in comes the income" - and to
bureaucrats, just another case file to fill. "All the specialists, they
asked questions that made no sense to me, and if I talked, they weren't
listening, just reading what the last one wrote about me on little pieces
of paper. None of them were there to live my life with me."

This one child's journey through the foster-care system illuminates the
complexities involved in trying to protect children from neglect and abuse.
Twenika Huddleston will be gone from the system in May, when she will turn
21 and, under New York law, "age out" of foster care.

But with so many other children climbing into her crowded lap, Mother
Government will hardly notice.

Taken In and Tossed Around

By the time child-welfare workers intercepted Twenika eight years ago, she
was already what experts call a "parentified child," taking on
responsibilities as fast as her crack-addicted mother shed them. At age 12,
she was cook, maid, little mother, streetwise daughter - in a South Bronx
apartment that resembled a circle of hell. Addicts drifting in and out.
Refrigerator often empty. Mom gone on binges. A male babysitter who
molested her, then threatened to "cut her neck off" if she told anyone.

Child-welfare authorities discovered Diane Huddleston's crack habit in
March 1989, when school officials called to say her 7-year-old son was
coming to class in clothes so filthy they reeked. A particularly dogged
caseworker dug out the full story and threatened to remove the children.
Under pressure, Diane Huddleston voluntarily signed them into foster care
that fall.

The Huddleston children were hardly alone. New York's foster-care system
would expand by a record 10,000 children that year, breaking the previous
record expansion of 9,500, set the year before. The crack phenomenon had
arrived, and so had newly aggressive casework - inspired, like the recent
federal legislation, by public fury over recurring, deadly breakdowns.

Once children were removed from their homes, however, the system's
vigilance seemed to vanish. Perhaps too overwhelmed to focus on any
particular child, a psychiatrist who took Twenika's wretched history
concluded, "Psychological stressors: moderate." Notwithstanding Diane
Huddleston's chronic addiction, a caseworker wrote, "Goal: Return to parent
8/90." (On Twenika's birth certificate, as in her life, there was blank
space where a father should have been.)

A psychologist who tested her intelligence classified her as borderline
retarded, without mentioning the bright first- and second-grader documented
in Twenika's school records. He noted in passing that her intelligence
scores may have been distorted by "anxiety and cultural disadvantage," and
ranked only her "visual-motor" skills as average. The child of the streets
had lightning-fast reflexes, even when all else seemed to fail her.

Feeling stifled and misunderstood, she rebelled. "Nobody listens, no matter
how many times you try to explain," she says. "You say your dream car is
purple, they say gray is better. You say you want to be a nurse, they say a
secretary's better. You say your mom will never get better, they say, 'Come
on Twenika, keep hoping.' They want you to be a freaking robot."

First placed in a large group home with hard-to-control teenagers in
central Queens, she soon was transferred to another group home with girls
of all ages in a two-family house near Long Island, where she was
perpetually "grounded" for breaking the no-smoking edict and other rules.

She kept running away, navigating across four boroughs of New York City in
search of her mother, sometimes finding her at the Brooklyn apartment of a
longtime paramour, other times not finding her anywhere.

"If I'm with my mother, she wouldn't leave all the time and take drugs,"
the case file recounts her saying at age 13. "She'd be taking care of me
instead." She pined for a mother of earlier years: an often sober Diane
Huddleston who had been a home health aide with a steady boyfriend named Sam.

The flip side of such memories was explosive fury at the mother who had
turned her back. "My mother didn't teach me nothing!" she raged. "For God's
sake, she wasn't even there when I got my period."

In a system full of hard-to-handle children, Twenika was an increasingly
familiar type - a child so battered by life, so angry, so prematurely
independent, that few foster parents could manage her. As these children
multiplied, studies showed that victims of neglect and abuse were twice as
likely to commit violent crimes as other children. Beyond a swollen
foster-care system, social workers increasingly wondered what price society
would pay for all these damaged lives.

After brief stays in the group homes, Twenika in 1990 and 1991 was kicked
out of three successive foster-family homes in suburban Queens and Long
Island for variously stealing money, sneaking boys into her room and
general defiance. She was sure the families loved her only for the
foster-care stipend that came with her, perceiving them as most attentive
on days the check came. "Here, Twenika," she remembers them calling, then
counting - to the penny - an allowance set by the foster-care agency.

After her third expulsion, at age 14, she was placed in a highly structured
group home on Long Island. Everyone had duties. Sweep the stairs, clean the
kitchen, wash the dishes. Allowances were disbursed on Fridays depending on
chores performed. Counselors continually made entries in a log book the
girls were never allowed to see.

Within two months, incensed at staff members writing secret assessments of
her, she flew into a rage. Smashing all the windows, breaking computers,
stealing the log book, she wound up briefly in juvenile detention for her
violent outburst - the behavioral trajectory often described in studies of
foster children.

Families Split by Crack

While not the only explanation for mounting foster-care rolls, drugs -
especially crack cocaine - are the heart of the problem. Substance abuse is
a factor in eight out of 10 abuse and neglect cases nationally. With drug
treatment programs oversubscribed and often ineffective, data show that
children like Twenika have been backing up in foster care since widespread
crack use began more than a decade ago. Despite reported declines in crack
use, they continue arriving today, and staying - children whose parents
remain lost to drugs and whose own emotional scars inhibit adoption.

Like the demographics of crack use, these children are disproportionately
minorities - black children are found in foster care at four times their
proportion in the U.S. population. Calls for vigilance increasingly clash
with voices in the minority community decrying a system that rips children
of color from their parents.

To Euvonia Jackson, a supervisor in New York's child-welfare agency,
Twenika Huddleston came to personify the destruction crack was wreaking on
families in the early 1990s.

"We were inundated with children. We had children backing up at our desks,"
Jackson recalls. Twenika was her recurring nightmare. "Every other month,
I'd get a call from my worker saying, 'Mrs. Jackson, that little Huddleston
girl is AWOL again.' We kept worrying she was dead somewhere."

At one point, just before Christmas 1991, Jackson summoned the 14-year-old
girl. She was braced for a menacing delinquent, when a weary child with
sad, brown eyes showed up at her desk. "What is the problem?" Jackson
demanded.

Twenika let out a sigh. "I've had a lot of disappointments."

"This was a child who had fallen through the cracks," Jackson says today.
"They treated her like she was going to stay six months, and she stayed
eight years."

The system wasn't built to accommodate children growing up in foster care;
the recent adoption law aims to force agencies through aggressive
timetables and incentives to free more such children for adoption. The
impetus is greatest for babies because research shows that nurturing,
attentive care is crucial to brain development. And the law is likely to
affect them most, since adoptive parents favor babies and young children.
But 40 percent of children in out-of-home care nationally are over age 11;
almost 70 percent are over 6.

Most older foster children, scarred by chronic neglect, are still likely to
finish out their childhoods in adolescent group homes, according to
officials in several cities. Those homes are overburdened by rising
caseloads and government budget cuts. Many nights in the last year,
adolescents have slept on sunken couches at the dingy Emergency Children's
Services office on Laight Street in lower Manhattan, awaiting placement.

Within three months of Twenika's meeting with Jackson, her file was back on
the supervisor's desk with a chilling entry: On March 5, 1992, she had
attempted suicide by swallowing 28 Dimetapp tablets. Hospitalized, she was
diagnosed with borderline personality and post-traumatic stress disorders.
A doctor recommended long-term commitment to a psychiatric hospital, but
none could be found with room for a child under 16. A subsequent evaluation
recommended outpatient therapy instead. Within a month, she was returned to
a foster family on Long Island.

Shattered Dreams of Home

The next year brought a remarkable transformation. Twenika was making good
grades at a Long Island high school, warming up to her foster mother,
making friends. A psychiatrist wrote in 1993: "Twenika is an attractive
young woman, neatly and stylishly dressed. She is alert, oriented, relevant
and coherent."

There was a simple explanation. After three years of near-total absence
from her children, standing them up at almost every scheduled visit, Diane
Huddleston had entered drug treatment - a crack pipe exploding in her face
had scared her straight - and was working hard to get them back.

Mother and children attended family therapy sessions together, and Diane
openly discussed with them the pain her addiction had caused. Unlike
Twenika, her brother Cory, then 12, had been primarily with one foster
family on Long Island. As the therapy progressed, they began spending
weekends together, rebuilding a family.

In the midst of this transformation, at age 15, Twenika became pregnant.
Untutored in birth control, terrified for her future, she buried her fear
in the excitement of having her own mother back - even if only on Saturdays
and Sundays.

"Sometimes, she'd wake me up in the middle of the night and say, 'Twenika,
can I sleep with you?' " Twenika recalls. "And I'd say, 'Sure, Mommy,
what's the matter?' And she'd say, 'I feel the urge to go out and use.' ...
Eventually we'd fall asleep. I'd wake up off and on to make sure she was
still there."

Ravan Diane Huddleston was born Oct. 15, 1993, in time for the family's
first Thanksgiving together in four years. (As with Twenika, the "father"
line on Ravan's birth certificate was blank.) Impressed with Diane's
progress, the child-welfare agency scheduled a permanent reunion of the
family to begin on Christmas Eve. The agency took care of everything, even
renting an apartment and providing furnishings: two dressers, four pillows,
four sets of sheets, dishes, pots, two comforters, six washcloths, eight
towels, curtains, rods and two alarm clocks.

Twenika was so excited that she packed her belongings two weeks in advance.
On moving day, she was too giddy to notice that her mother didn't call that
morning, as she had every day for weeks. When the phone finally rang, it
was the foster-care agency. The furniture truck was at the apartment, but
Diane Huddleston was nowhere to be found.

"I don't think I saw my mother for two months after that," says Twenika,
who found herself again shuttling between foster homes. "When I did see
her, I didn't say anything and I didn't ask anything. Because it was
something I decided didn't happen. Even to this day, I haven't asked."

Diane Huddleston had excuses: The apartment was rat-infested, "not fit for
my granddaughter." She always had excuses, one for each time she returned
to crack after entering rehab. The case file lists six such reversals. She
thinks there were more, isn't sure.

"I'm a crack addict," she says today. "I don't have a conscience. I learned
that in treatment. Crack takes your conscience. I cannot tell you or anyone
I won't touch drugs again, even though I know it's no good for me."

Diane nods with admiration for "Tissie," her nickname for her daughter that
she alternates with "my little bitch."

"Tissie's a trooper," she adds.

Twenika doesn't respond when told of her mother's praise. "I kept thinking
that I was going to go home, and then I wasn't going home," she says. "And
I just couldn't take it. Finally something just clicked: 'Twenika, you're
never going home.' "

Between Stability and Chaos

Moved by the plight of adolescents stuck in foster care, Euvonia Jackson
wanted to do more than manage their cases. Her own children grown, she
resolved to become a foster parent to teenage girls. In December 1994, she
was summoned to meet her first foster child, a 17-year-old girl with a
toddler.

When the caseworker made the introductions, Jackson was certain she had
heard wrong.

"This," the woman repeated, "is Twenika Huddleston."

"My first reaction was I was relieved to know she was alive," Jackson says.
"Then I thought, 'My Lord, what am I going to do with this girl?' " Another
caseworker who knew Twenika warned, "Oh, Mrs. Jackson, she's bad!"

Jackson's instinct was to ply the girl with love and attention from the
moment they arrived at her first-floor apartment in a town house in
Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood. "Whatever you need, we're going to buy
it today," she told her on the first day. "Clothes, food, write it down and
we'll get it." Showing Twenika the bunk bed in her new room, she said, "If
you don't like it, we can take it apart and make it a twin." Taking the
girl to work with her, Jackson first stopped in the cafeteria. "Whatever
you want, order it."

When Twenika rebuffed her as "this old lady," the 52-year-old Jackson
didn't flinch. "Trust me, girlfriend. You're going to like being with me."
That night, at bedtime, Jackson kissed her forehead. "I love you," she told
the girl. "I know it's hard for you to believe a person who you don't know
loves you. But those are the words you need to hear."

Twenika's new caseworker, Cherise Littlejohn, took a similar approach. She
shared child-care tips, taught her to rock Ravan to sleep and punish
tantrums with timeouts rather than beatings, as Twenika had favored.

A high-school dropout since Ravan's birth, Twenika enrolled in a GED
course. Jackson paid for babysitters. Later, she enrolled in Bedford
Stuyvesant Outreach Center, a special high school for older students,
eventually making the honor roll. "You go, girl!!!" Littlejohn wrote to her
in celebration.

But affection was hardly a cure-all. She rebelled, often. She also had
terrifying flashbacks, of being molested as a child, of her mother walking
away. Each time she exploded in rages. She balked at taking antidepressants
and anti-anxiety medication. Jackson inspected Twenika's mouth every night
after realizing she was hiding the pills under her tongue, then spitting
them out. A fistfight with a neighborhood girl landed her briefly in jail.

Last March, with her life precariously balanced between stability and
chaos, Twenika discovered a small burn on Ravan's left buttock. She
summoned Jackson, who surmised the toddler had rolled into a hot iron left
on the floor by another of her foster daughters. Following protocol for
foster parents, Jackson notified the foster-care agency and put ointment on
the burn.

In a normal world, the incident would have ended there. But in politically
charged New York, where several children die of abuse each month, it
quickly escalated. A city investigator concluded that the burn was no
accident and demanded to know why Ravan hadn't been taken to a hospital.
Jackson responded - correctly, according to the case record - that the burn
was first degree, treatable at home.

Following protocol, the investigator interrogated everyone separately.
Jackson was amazed to learn that Twenika claimed to have begged Jackson in
vain to take Ravan to the hospital. Confused and shocked, Jackson denied
the accusation. Unconvinced, the caseworker removed Ravan to a temporary
foster home for alleged neglect.

A judge ultimately threw out the neglect charge, but not before Ravan had
spent two weeks in a strange foster home. The episode traumatized her, as
it did Jackson and Twenika. Only months later did Jackson make sense of
Twenika's accusation.

"She thought she was going to lose her child, and it was just automatic -
she defended herself," Jackson finally concluded. "It wasn't about me. It's
the way she's learned to survive: Before I go down, you go down."

Within weeks of recovering Ravan, Twenika announced she was ready to move
out on her own. Jackson told Twenika she could change her mind at any time.
But she didn't object.

From One System to Another

The final chapter of Twenika's story as a foster child is unfolding in a
studio apartment on a battered stretch of King's Highway in Brooklyn. Here,
she is trying to fashion a stable adult life after eight years of
staggering efforts - her own and the system's - to save her childhood.

It is an odd first apartment for a young woman. There are no scrapbooks
bulging with mementos, no pictures of friends. Almost as if there was no
childhood at all. "When my mom got evicted after she put us in foster care,
everything went in the garbage," she says.

The child-welfare system and her awesome survival skills have delivered her
to the door of adult possibility. On May 19, when she turns 21, she will
age out of this welfare system into another one, as many foster-care lifers
do. She has been on public assistance since moving into the apartment with
Ravan in August, getting by on food stamps, a $109 check from the
government every two weeks and occasional money from her boyfriend, Andre,
who works at a grocery store.

But after more than eight years in the child-welfare system, Twenika vows
she wants no part of adult welfare - not, that is, once she gets an
education. Last June, she collected a high school diploma. Next month, she
plans to enter LaGuardia Community College in Queens to study nursing. Her
eyes grow moist when she says out loud what now seems possible: Twenika
Huddleston, a nurse.

But the dream is poised on the thin reeds of public assistance and free day
care for Ravan. Its precariousness was palpable one day last fall when a
city bureaucrat told Twenika that only working mothers qualify for day care
under New York's welfare reform rules. The old survival instincts kicked in.

"How do they expect people to make it?" Twenika roared at the worker. "I
can't educate myself and have Ravan in the desk right beside me. They
always say if you want to be somebody, you can be that, but as soon as you
try to make something of yourself, they stick you. Well, I ain't going to
get stuck!"

The crisis passed when she learned that in New York, children of foster
children have special access to day care. Twenika greeted this not as a
gift from the state but as another piece of a puzzle she had to snap into
place just to stay in the game.

She snapped in a big piece a year ago; she had a five-year birth control
device implanted. "No more babies until I am prepared, financially and
emotionally," she insists. She and Andre recently became engaged.

She has repaired her relationship with Jackson, who recently helped coax
her out of a flashback about a childhood sexual horror. "Remember what we
said," Jackson kept saying over Twenika's screams. "We're going to go
through this together. You are never going to be in this alone again."

But Twenika has known worse things than being alone, and survived them.
Survival skills, in fact, are the birthright of this daughter of Diane
Huddleston and Mother Government.

One recent afternoon, Andre and Ravan are out, and Twenika sits in her
darkened apartment playing her favorite video game, Ms. Pac-Man. The game
involves using a joystick to steer a little head with a big mouth through
monsters advancing from all sides. The principle is simple: Gobble the
monsters, lest they gobble you. If even one monster strikes first, Twenika
explains, "you die." It is a game of survival, rewarding those
"visual-motor" skills the psychologist in 1989 had seen as her only strong
suit.

"Got you, got you, got you, got you!" Twenika crows, devouring monsters to
her left, to her right, above and below.

Only once in more than a dozen games does she lose. "Dadgum, you chased me
down!" she grumbles. Then in no time, she settles back and levels a gaze at
the screen, spoiling for a rematch. "Okay," she dares, "let's go again."