thank you. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2023] >> c-span "washington journal" talking about policy. and we'll discuss the role health care will pay in the upcoming campaign with emily jean and the kato institute. and the envoy to yemen talks about yemen relations and houthi strikes in the red sea. c-span's "washington journal" join in the conversation live on c-span, c-span now or online at c-span.o.

>> the house will be in order >> c-span covers congress like no other. since 1979 we've been your primary source for capitol hill providing balanced unfiltered look at government. all with the support of america's cable company. c-span, 45 years and counting. powered by cable. peter: rob henn >> rob henderson, author of "troubled" a story of foster

care and social class and write the late historian harold bloom once told you that you were forged in a fire. what did you mean by that? rob: that was shortly after i arrived at yale harold bloom, an esteemed literary director at yale and was in his twilight years and visited him in his home when i was a student at yale. i conveyed my shortened, abbreviated version of my story to him. he was 87 years old at this time and he listened quietly and at the end he gently said, you were forged in a fire. i think maybe that was his poetic way of responding and encapsulating the experiences that i had had growing up in foster homes in los angeles, enlisting in the military when i was 17, all of the setbacks and hiccups and all of the family

drama and tore moyle -- turmoil i'd experienced all hout my childhood. born into poverty, and attempting to make my way in the world. peter: you also had a yell friend tell you that you hit the adoption lottery. do you agree with that? mr. henderson: well, he was mostly commenting on my adopted family, and how they had won this kind of adoption lottery. when you are an adoptive parent and you receive a kid who has maybe had many difficult experiences in foster care, as i did, to some extent, you are taking a bit of a risk, a bit of a chance. this is true for any child regardless of circumstances, but perhaps especially so for kids in foster care. so this friend of mine at yale made this joke, your family won the adoption lottery. i think he meant that my family,

they were kind of working class, they were not college-educated, kind of blue-collar background. they adopt this kid out of the los angeles foster care system. and despite a lot of difficulties and self-defeating behaviors and all these other things i experienced that i note throughout my book, i ended up having a relatively successful enlistment in the air force and somehow managed to get into yale, then went on to obtain a phd at the university of cambridge in england, and have managed to make something of my life. and i think my adoptive family is at least as surprised as i am that it turned out this way. peter: how many homes had you lived in by the age of eight? mr. henderson: by the age of eight, well, if we count -- all of the foster homes until the age of eight, i lived in seven different foster homes in los angeles.

my adoptive mother later gave me this file full of documents from people involved in my situation in foster care, social workers involved in my case, doctors, teachers and so on. so, it was a very thick file. in reading through it, i discovered before i was able to form memories, when i was just an infant, my birth mother and i were homeless for a time. we lived in a car, then eventually we settled in a sluml ord apartment in a poor area in los angeles. from there, i was placed into the system. so, even to 10 homes depending on how you count, by my eighth birthday. peter: in your book “troubled," you write about yo eliest memories. if you askospeople to recall the earliest memory, it is

usually around when they are age three. here is mine. it is completely dark. i am gripping my mher's lap, moving my face into her stomach so deeply i cannot breathe. i come up for air and see two police officers looming over us. i know they wantoake my mom away but i am scared and don't want to let her go. i fasten myself in her as hard as i can. my internal alarms are going o and i am sobbing. i want the strange men in black clothes to leave. the memory picksp, like a dream, in a long white hallway with my mother. i'm sitting on a bench next to her drinking chola milk. my three-year-old legs dangle above the floor. i sneeze and spell my chocolate milk. i look to my mom for help but she cannot move her arms. she's wearing handcuffs. what else do you remember about your birth mother? mr. henderson: those are the sum total of my memories of my birth

mother. sort of first-hand memories. i mentioned that file, these documents before, and there were some other facts i learned about her. she was from seoul south korea. she went to california to study and after some years, she became severely addicted to drugs. i learned that she has two other sons besides me, so i have two older half brothers besides me. so, she has had at least three sons with three different men. i have never met them, and i have never seen my mother since those events when i was three when she was arrested and subsequently deported back to korea. i was born in los angeles, so i was a u.s. citizen, and i was

placed into the system. she was asked by forensic psychologists and law enforcement, they asked if she knew who my father was, to see if maybe i can be placed with him, and she replied she did not know who he was. she had some inkling that his name was robert and that is why i was named after him, but otherwise she does not know anything else about this man or where he went or where he want -- or what he does. i did not learn anything about my birth mother until later. i just recently took a 23andme genetic ancestry test a few months ago, and i went the first 30-some years of my life know nothing about him. i learned he was hispanic, he was mexican. so the 23andme results indicated that my father, i traced his lineage to spain and indigenous parts of mexico, north america. so, yeah, i did not know that

part of my ethnic background. so i'm half asian, half hispanic. as far as my mother, i have not seen her since those events. i think about those flashbulb memories on occasion that i have with her. when i was a kid and i saw those men in the black clothes, i did not know that they were police officers. at age three i was not sophisticated enough to understand what was really happening there. but i knew that they held some kind of authority, some ability to separate us. and this was a terrifying experience for me as a kid, and i did not really understand what was about to happen, what was about to unfold, that that would be essentially the last time i would ever see her. peter: have you done any further research to find out who your father's family is? mr. henderson: no, i haven't. i haven't dug into that.

i suppose i could hire a private investigator for someone to explore my father's side of the family. but i have been asked about this, have i ever thought about reconnecting with my mother, or seeking information or contact with my father. and i've never really had a strong desire to do so. my feeling is essentially that they didn't prioritize my needs, they didn't prioritize my upbringing and security and safety and all those things. and so, i just feel, you know, i don't really see the need to devote resources and time to seek these people who clearly did not have my best interest in mind. so, yeah, that's kind of where i sit with it. i have spoken to other people who have been adopted, and some of them have been in different circumstances where their

parents did have some residual care for them. but i don't really feel that way and i have neverela strong urge to reconnect. peter: back to your book, “troubled," when i was a baby my mother and i lived in car. we moved into a poor neighborhood in l.a. documents from siaworkers report that my mother would tie me to a chair with a bathroom belt so that she could get high in anoeroom without being interrupted. she left bruises and marks on my face. while my mother did drugs, i would cry from the other room as i struggled to break free. rob henderson, when you think about this, what kind of rights should both mothers and fathers have? mr. henderson: well, i think the current system is set up to prioritize the rights of birthparents. you know, i'm not opposed to

that. i think in most cases it is probably the right call. in most cases, birthparents do care deeply for their children. but there are extraordinary circumstances. mine was one of them. my father was just completely absent, not in the picture at all. and possibly did not even want to be. and my birth mother was severely addicted. she would have people coming in and out of the apartment at all hours of the day and night, trading favors for drugs. and in most cases i was a nuisance to her. she was extremely neglectful. enough to keep me alive, but not much more than that. and so in this case, ultimately the state of california made the right call in putting me in foster care. but these are two horrible options. foster care is far from an ideal arrangement for young people,

developing children. being with a neglectful, drug addicted mother is also far from optimal as well. so you have two very bad decisions and you just have to choose the one that is less bad. peter: rosalina burton testified before congress about her childhood in foster care in 2015. here's a short portion of her testimony. >> i spent most of my childhood in the foster care system. i experienced a 12 years in care and more than 23 different placements. i eventually aged out of congregate care and i am still hoping to find my forever family. my six siblings and i have been removed from apparent's carefully first time after my mother went away to receive treatment for addiction, and my father was reported for neglect. my siblings and i were taken to an emergency shelter, then one of my sisters and i were soon placed with my maternal great and. my great aunt was a prepared

woman and living with her gave me a sense of love and normalcy that i unfortunately never experienced again. while living with my great aunt, i saw my siblings and parents regularly. i felt close to them and desired their presence in my life. later after we were scattered throughout foster care and group homes, my close knit sibling group came strangers to each other. by the time i was 13, i often worry that if one of my siblings were to pass, i would not have anything to say at their funeral because i did not even know who they were anymore. peter: rob henderson, throughout her testimony, i saw you nodding your head. mr. henderson: well, when she mentioned the stability with her great aunt, that's something that every child creates, to have a secure, stable attachment to a parent or caregiver or some adult they trust and has their best interests in mind. and that is something that i lacked in all of the foster

homes are lived in. she mentioned living in 20-some placements by age 13, 12. i mean, that's just extraordinary that children have to experience that. i lived in seven homes in just shy of five years. there is this question of why does the system work this way. why are kids so frequently placed into different homes? and one reason is because often what happens with foster children is that a birth relative will reenter the picture. maybe the mother sobers up or the father returns, were in this case are great aunt was able to care for her. but if in a child is in one placement for too long this can create issues of attachment and loyalty. if a foster child is with one foster family for six months or a year, and they become comfortable and devoted to this family, and then suddenly a family member returns,

oftentimes a child does not want to go. also, on the part of the foster parent, they become attached to the child and become reluctant to relinquish the child when a birth parent returns. and so, the system has sort of resolved this by frequently placing the child in different environments, such that there is never any potential issues with loyalty or devotion or conflict between foster families and birth relatives. and i think maybe it sounds nice in the abstract, but often it introduces a lot of instability and difficulty in children's lives, because this is a robust and confirmed finding and development of psychology research, that children from birth to five to seven years old, those first few years of life are critical for forming secure attachments and an internal sense of trust, bonds,

and the ability to form healthy relationships with other people. and it's no wonder when you look at the statistics and the outcomes for kids who live in foster care, they are abysmal. very few kids end up having any kind of healthy, flourishing, successful life when they go through a system like that. and yeah, there is this statistic eyesight in the book -- i cite in the book that for college graduation rates, in the u.s. overall it is about 30% of u.s. adults obtaining a bachelor's degree. for children who live in poor families, 11% of children from those families go on to graduate from college. but for foster kids it is only 3%. some statistics suggest that is less than 3%, but if we call it

3%, what this means as a child born to a poor family in the u.s. is four times more likely to graduate from college than a kid who has spent time in foster care. and that is how tall the obstacles are, how long the our ads t odds are. peter: bk to your book, one in five foster kids are placed in fiver re homes throughout their time in the system. three quarters spend at least two years in foster care. 33% stay five or more years. one in four are adopted. the median age for leaving foster care is seven years old. and according to the department of health and human services, there are about 391,000 children in foster care in fiscal year 2021. asians, about 2000. black or african-american, about 87,000. hispanic, 85,000.

native americans, 9400. white, 168,000. and some of the reasons for children being removed from their birth homes include neglect, parent drug abuse, caretaker inability to cope, physical abuse, housing, and parent incarceration. are foster families looked at carefully before they are allowed to take in children? mr. henderson: well, you mentioned somewhere in the ballpark of 400,000 kids in care. what shocked me as i was doing research in this book, there was a report from mpr showing the number has roughly doubled since the year 2000. this is largely due to some of the reasons you had just outlined there.

but the big one was drug abuse, drug addiction, in the wake of the opioid crisis and easier access to hard drugs, prescription drugs, street drugs. it is easier than ever to obtain those. and this is having a detrimental effect on parent's ability to supply care for their kids. and so these reasons, all of these facts, i mean, these contribute to the deterioration of families in general. but for kids, you mentioned the sort of ethnicity, the demographic rate down these families. the way i remember it -- california was unique. i was in los angeles. most of my foster siblings were hispanic. two of my foster siblings were black, with some white kids. there was only one other asian kid in one of the homes. but yeah, that was roughly what

you would expect for that part of california. it's a terrible system. i mean, when you consider just how unstable it is, and the effects of instability on young children. i report some interesting data that i uncovered as i was researching and reviewing all of the research and psychology for outcomes in children in these impoverished circumstances. one thing that shocked me was, this has been consistently discovered. researchers will make it is stinks in between childhood harshness and childhood instability. and harshness is essentially low family income. meager financial resources, growing up poor. and instability is, this is captured by a variety of different questions in these surveys asking people how frequently they relocated when

they were children, how many different grandparents or caregivers they lived with, if their parents were married or divorced, if they had a single parent how many different romantic partners their parent had. it basically captured day-to-day unpredictability and instability . what the research consistently shows is that childhood harshness or poverty has kind of a tenuous link with detrimental outcomes in adulthood. things like incarceration, substance abuse, poverty, teen pregnancy rates. the correlation is small. some find no correlational relationship whatsoever. but there's a clear and strong relationship between instability and those outcomes later in life. other researchers have compared children raised in wealthy but unstable families. so if there is divorce or addiction or abuse, just a lot

of turmoil and drama within a wealthy family, if a child grows up in those circumstances despite having all of their material needs met, those children have worse outcomes in life compared to children born in poor families that are married and stable and secure, and prioritize the well-being of the child. that was one of the more stunning findings. but later, it matched a lot of what i saw as i transitioned to the military and college and so on, just observing people from different kinds of family environments. peter: rob henderson, who was mrs. martinez? mr. henderson: mrs. martinez, she was the final foster parent that i had. this was something that only in hindsight as a adult reflect on these homes, i realized that in every home i had, the primary caregiver was a woman.

often the foster fathers were at work, or they were checked out. they were not really involved in the caretaking circumstances. so you'd mentioned, how much do foster parents, how carefully are they evaluated or assessed. my sense is not very much, simply because the system is so overburdened. i just recently read that los angeles has one of the most overburdened systems, meaning they have a surplus of children who need homes, and there are not enough foster parents to take them in. of course the state is not going to allow children to sleep on the streets. so in response they lower the threshold for who can qualified to be a foster parent. essentially my sense is that short of outright abuse, social workers in the system will look the other way if it is kind of basic neglect, or less than adequate caregiving, that they

will allow a child -- it is better for them to sleep in a neglectful environment than to be out in the cold. mrs. martinez, that home that i lived in was unique for a lot of reasons, but one of them was because i was the only kid in that home. her husband worked, he was seldom home. she was more or less a stay-at-home homemaker. and i remember when it first arrived in this home, i was seven years old. i was first stunned at how clean the house was. all six of the foster homes are lived in beforehand were in various states of squalor. some of the homes are lived in had eight or 10-plus kids living in them. some of the houses i lived in, or a duplex or an apartment, there would be one bedroom with two bunk beds, four kids to a r oom. when you had that environment with so many kids, it's impossible to keep them clean.

i arrived at mrs. martinez's house and i noticed how clean it is. then gradually i came to realize that she would take in young foster boys, typically kind of before puberty, but old enough to follow instructions. so, i was seven at this point. and she was very stern and very this austere, cold woman. they had this small pool in the back, i would clean it, i would sweep the floors on a daily basis, rake the leaves, cut the grass. she had two dogs i fed and w alked and took care of. she later got a parent, mr. carlos, who i described in the book. to this day my attitude towards birds is pretty negative, especially not parrots. this bird had sharp claws and a

beak and it would poke me and stab me and scratch me. and whenever i would ask her, why do i have to do these chores, i would go to school and then come home and work for four to five hours around the house. she would say i am trying to keep you out of trouble, there are a lot of bad kids around this neighborhood and i don't want you getting into mischief with them. and she was right, there were kids in this neighborhood, and i did find ways to get into trouble with them, get into mischief, pickpocket, vandalize buildings, steel and so on. but a lot of that was also just self-serving reasoning, that she early liked keeping it spotless and clean home. she did not really seem to mind if i was not doing well in school. so while i was living with mrs. martinez, there was one point where i was doing so badly in my classes -- i was changing schools.

every time i changed a home, i would change schools. sometimes i would change schools three or four times within a year, 1.5 years. so they sent a psychologist to give me a test. they thought i might have had a learning disability. i ended up scoring pretty low on the test. i did just well enough for them to believe i did not have a learning disability, but i remember being angry about taking this test. to me, it just seemed like more homework, more school, more adults asking me to do things i don't want to do. not only do i have to go to school but then i have to take this test, and now i have to go around and collect weeds or rake the leaves or something. it just felt like more burdens that i had to take on. and in hindsight, i think it is kind of absurd that here you have this kid that is moving homes and moving schools all the time and he is falling behind in academic process, and a third thing that comes to mind is he

has a learning disability. they want to medicalize him, give me medication. i don't what the next steps would have been had i qualified for disability. and they did not think to actually look at the root causes of, well, maybe he is not doing well because his environment is unstable and he does not know who his teacher is going to be three months from now, or which home he is going to live in. so, yeah, i note the astonishing rates of psychiatric medication taken by foster kids in the book. and i think a lot of that is because adults are busy, the system works way it works, it is overburdened, and people would rather medicalize medicaid than actually consider how these disorderly environments can affect children in their development. peter: how did you end up in red bluff, california in the northern part of california? mr. henderson: well, let's see. i mentioned i was living with

mrs. martinez, she was the final homeland listing. at one point while i was with her, the state of california mandated that i see a child psychiatrist. i think this was sort of a typical checkup, that every so often a kid in the system just has to go see a doctor or psychiatrist to check in and see how they are doing. maybe to medicate them, or just to check in. and this psychiatrist actually took the time to look at my file and realized there was no hope of me ever being reunited with the birth parent. my mother was in another country. no one knew who my father was. there was no possibility of an aunt or a grandmother or someone else to take me in. so this doctor realized this and wrote up this report strongly suggesting that i basically be placed into the adoption system in california. i think this is just sort of

emblematic of how little attention is paid to each individual child's case. just massive bureaucracy and a child's file can get lost and reshuffled into different homes and nobody takes the time to think -- i should have been put up for adoption when i was three, and instead i was put up when i was seven, simply because no one took the time to realize, oh, there's no possibility of reuniting with my family. so it just introduced a lot of needless instability. eventually, a family in northern california, the henderson family, a man and a woman, a married couple, and they had a young daughter, their birth daughter. they adopted me and took me in. we settled in this dusty blue-collar town in northern california. at the time -- well, even in

this day, it is in one of the poorest counties in california. my adoptive family were a working-class background. my adoptive father was a truck driver. my adoptive mother had various kind of jobs. she was a certified nursing aide, she later became an assistant social worker. but she did not attend college either. but they managed to get this kind of small home for my sister and me, for the family. and it was kind of a surreal feeling to be adopted. they had to carefully explain to me that this was the last kind of placement that i would ever have. that, now you have a mom and dad. i remember, i referred to her as mrs. henderson and she would say, sweetie, call me mom and dad if you are comfortable with that. i was more than happy to do that by this point.

i was old enough and had been in enough schools, but by this point i knew kids had mom and dads. i had mrs. martinez, or whatever the foster family. and i had all these foster siblings, too. that was a difficult part of the system. sometimes i would enter a new home and i would be a little nervous or anxious. or scared or vigilant. some of the kids were nice and it would befriend me, and i would become friends with them. they would become accustomed. even though it is a strange new environment, at least i have family here. within foster siblings would go somewhere else. so not only would i not know where i was going next, i would not know where my foster siblings would be day-to-day or week to week. but then when i had my adoptive sister, met her, and realized, once i fully accepted that i was never going to be taken from her and she was never going to be taken from me, and i

would always know where she was and what she was up to. yeah, it was just a really heavy feeling to realize that. peter: did it work? mr. henderson: well, it worked for -- it was a temporary arrangement. so, a little over a year after the adoption, after i had moved in, and changed my last name, i was robert henderson, took their name and had a mom and a dad. it was a really nice year or so. my adoptive father, i would go with him on these long truck driving rides. i just rumored this feeling of, wow, this is my dad and i have a dad and it is so cool to ride in his truck with him. there were just moments like that. but then they got divorced.

and this was really hard. you know, because i was led to believe that this was going to be my family. and of course i was not going to be put in a different home or something like that. but instead, for a temporary period, they separated into different homes. my sister and i would go to -- we did this sort of weekly arrangement we would stay with mom for a week, dad for a week. then one day, my adoptive mother had to explain to me that my sister was going, but i was not going to go this time to my adoptive father's house. and she explained that he was angry with her for divorcing him. it was her decision to separate from him. so, he decided to stop speaking

with me as a way to retaliate and get back at her. yeah, it was confusing for a lot of reasons. i did not really think of my adoptive father is really capable of that. i mean, just overnight, no more communication with him. and so after never knowing my biological father, and then living in all of those foster homes, and then being adopted and then losing contact with my adoptive father, learning that he no longer wanted to speak with me, which was devastating. and so it was just me and my mom. we lived in a duplex next to a gas station in red blocks. lit -- in red bluff. there were other kids in the neighborhood. my mom was working full-time and i was a latchkey kid. for a time, i would just go and

hang out with my friends and smoke. i mean, the first time i drank beer was in the foster homes. i started tricking beer when i was five and i started drinking tequila when i was nine. age nine is when i picked up all of these bad habits i would drink, smoke weed, smoke cigarettes, take pills. it would go to the store and get some cold medicine and see how many of these cold medicine pills we could take before we started to feel funny. or eventually friends, older cousins or someone's older brother would get us genetic -- generic vicodin or percocet and we would find ways to get high or stoned, find ways to alter ourselves. my mom was just kind of too busy, too distracted to really notice what was going on. and yeah, that was kind of the next phase in that adoption sequence, was going from having this family to suddenly i'm with my mom and no longer have an

adoptive father. peter: did shelley bring stability to your family unit? mr. henderson: she did. so, at a certain point after the divorce, my mom started to visit a lot with this woman named shelley, who was her partner. eventually my mom revealed to me that actually she was gay, she was in love with shelley and she was in this relationship. i was almost 10 years old by this point. when was this? this was 2000, i think. this was before lgbt had been more mainstream. at that point it was still not as commonly known, especially for little kids. so this blew my mind. what? you are married to a man and now you're with a woman? i didn't have an issue with it, i was just kinda surprised.

like, oh. my mom had kind of told me, before she revealed that they were in a relationship she said, shelley is one of my friends and she was hanging out in our duplex a lot. she was really nice to meet. we would watch action movies together, and she would make me dinner or chocolate milk and do other things i enjoyed. she was kind of more honest and open, and more, i don't know, eager to speak in some ways, i guess. my mom was just dealing with divorce and her job and all these other issues, and shelley was just kind of around. once they had fully come out and just made it official, they got a house together and i moved in with them, and my sister would still do the weekly thing with her dad and us. from about nine-ish to 13, they created this very stable home for my sister and me. and, yeah, i mean other than the

fact it was two gay women, it was a conventional two-parent family. we would have family dinners and they would monitor my progress in school, my homework, how i was doing. they allowed me to enroll in martial arts at this boxing gym. they encouraged me. that was probably the most stable period of my upbringing, when my mom and shelley were together. and yeah, i still look back at that period very fondly. i never really had a father, but it did not bother me when my mom and shelley were together, because they were very present and very loving parents. and there were periods where they would attempt to foist a father figure on me. i think they were concerned that i was a young kid, had a bit of an attitude, enjoyed mischief

and they occasionally would get calls from school because i would get into fights or do something reckless. one of their male coworkers or someone's uncle or something like this. i kind of had at the boxing gym that i went to. but i did not really feel like at that point i needed it. mom and shelley were good enough as parents. te rob henderson, you write that as a kid, i was weighed down by instability and hopelessness. the military helped to unlock my potential because it provided a structured environment, a sharp contrast to the drum and disorder of my youth. i was spoed by sportive people who wanted meo succeed. in this new environment i came to realize that my childhood was anomalous, and i did not have to let it define the rest of my life. i'd been libat from the mistakes of my past.

i believe that the external comportment i had -- had allowed me to productively channel my restless energy. was the military accidental for you? mr. henderson: it was half accidental. in the sense that it was somewhat impulsive a decision. i enlisted right out of high school when i was 17, joined the air force. that branch, it did not hold special appeal for me necessarily. there were just two older male figures in my life who recommended it just happened to be air force veterans. i'd mentioned that period of stability with my mom shelley. but then shelley was shot. i tell that story in the book. she survived and thankfully managed to recover, but that introduced a lot of difficulties in the family and financial difficulties with medical bills. our home was eventually

foreclosed, our mom and shelley eventually split up. i get into that drum in the book. after my mom and shelley broke up, i was 16 or 17 years old. i moved in with my friend and his dad when i was in high school. i moved out of home essentially when i was 16. at this point i was mature enough and maybe introspective enough to realize that the path i was on was not good. i was barely passing my classes at this point. all the academic focus i had obtained and exhibited in my middle school years during those years of stability, they kind of fell by the wayside when i hit puberty and all the family drama, all of these forces around me. and i graduated with a 2.2 gpa. and so, yeah, my history teacher was in the air force and he could tell that i had some glimmer of potential. he could tell that i was kind of

a curious and open-minded kid. if circumstances had been different, more academically inclined. i think i had a d in history. but he knew. he could tell just from talking with me. once he gave up this idea that he could sort of get me to do well in his classes, he started talking to me like a person and say, what are you up to? what do you do with your free time? and we would just talk, talk about movies or sports or whatever. he was like, hey, check this out. he showed me a picture of himself in an air force uniform. he was in the air force before he became a picture. i was like, this is kind of cool. and my friend's dad who i lived with in my final year, him and his brother, he showed me his picture and he talked to me about the air force. and so, i went to the recruiter

and on a whim decided to sign the paper, took the military standardized exam, and didn't really give much thought to what it meant, what i was going to do, the job. i had to go to military entrance processing, something like that. that's where you choose your job, your occupation. they listed a catalog of available jobs and i just chose the one that sounded kind of cool, electronic warfare systems. i didn't know what that meant, but it had the words electronic and warfare and that was good enough for me. and off i went and i went to basic training. this was like 1.5 months after i graduated from high school. this was a mistake. if i had known how hot texas was in the summertime, i would not have gone then. but i was also in a hurry to leave red bluff's and get out of that varmint. in hindsight it was probably the

best decision i ever made, because it immediately got me out of the circumstance that i was in with my friends, with the jobs i had, the coworkers, the people around me, the choices that we were making. when i think about the direction of the lives of my high school friends and how i could have ended up in some of those positions. i had five close friends in high school growing up, two went to prison, one was shot to death. other friends were working menial jobs and not very happy with their lives. that could have easily been me if i just stuck around and not made this spur of the moment, half-baked decision to sign and i had my adoptive mom sign basically a permission slip to allow me to go because i was underage. yeah, i was by far the youngest guy in my basic training military. you are only 17? wow, you were in a hurry to get out of there. yes, i was. peter: how did you get to yale? mr. henderson: well, that is

eight years later. i was enlisted for eight years. i did two four-year, enlistment 17 to 25 years old. about a year out from my enlistment, i started to really consider what i wanted to do with my life. i joined the military not because i was excited about it or because that is what i always wanted. it was more that i was on the wrong path in the military would get me off the wrong path. but i still did not know what the right path was in my teenage years. by the time i reached my early 20's and matured a little bit more and became a bit more reflective and thoughtful, i realized that i'd always read a lot of books, even in high school. i would not do the homework, i would basically find ways to barely pass the classes. but i would still read textbooks. i would practice the math exercises. i was just naturally interested in ideas and learning, in abstraction, those kinds of things.

and so, as my enlistment was winding down, there were some setbacks and some hiccups and some difficulties along the way. but once i fully accepted that i should go to college, i should use the -- the military offers this incredible benefit, the g.i. bill. i googled around, eventually found my way to -- they bill themselves as an academic boot camp, where they basically invite military veterans were interested in going to college to just brush up their academic skills. how to write an essay, how to basically be a successful student. they also explain how the college application process works. i mean i did, not even take the sat in high school. i would not even know how to take the sat. but then they kind of explain how to put a college application

together, how to get letters of recommendation, all these kinds of things. it was only a two week kind of thing. and it took place at yell, of all places. it was started by a yale are ot student -- rotc student. they were undergrads who started this initiative. they invited me and there were about 15 other vets. it was an incredible experience for me and helpful. i remember being apprehensive that i would get into any colleges. i applied only to five colleges and i had the -- i thought maybe yale would take me as a student, we will see. got the interview, and i had to kind of explain why my high school transcript was not reflective of my academic potential. and i had to basically reveal

just how chaotic my life had been, and how i urged them to take a risk on me. i did take the sat finally and i got a really good score, so i think that saved my application. my grades were horrible. it was an atypical application for yale. but yeah, they took me in and i was very surprised by that. so i started classes in the fall of 2015. peter: rob henderson, you talk about your experience at yale being unfamiliar with the top 1% culture, being told you were privileged. you talk about luxury beliefs. and you write that quote, the po or reap what the luxury believe class sows. mr. henderson: well, i had known when i arrived at yale that it's a famous university.

so i knew there were going to be students from more affluent, moneyed background than the kind of poverty and squalor that i had come from. but i wasn't fully prepared for the kinds of differences in social capitol, in cultural capitol and outlook and opinions and personal experiences. i mean, one simple kind of disparity that i was shocked to discover it was just how many of my fellow classmates were raised by two parents. i mean, usually with two of their birth parents. almost every single one of them on campus i interacted with. later i did some research, and the vast majority of students are raised by both parents. whereas where i grew up in red bluff, none of us were raised by both of our birth parents. a lot of single mothers, grandmothers, aunts.

my friend was raised by a single father. but then i would interact with some of the students and they would champion strange beliefs -- to me that was strange, at least. i spoke with one student who said marriage was outdated and that we should evolve beyond it, that marriage was this oppressive outmoded structure. i asked her how she was raised, and she said she was raised by her mom and dad. that was her life, that was how she was raised. i asked her, what is your family enrichment, how do you envision that later in your life? she said she planned to find someone, get married, settle down, have kids, do the things she was familiar with and what her parents did for her. so, this was strange to me. it was a strange duplicity, where she, herself, had

obviously benefited from this kind of age-old structure, and the statistics bear this out. having two married parents is the best environment on average for kids. so she benefited from this structure. not a coincidence that she and all of her friends had that arrangement and they went to places like yale. she planned to carry this benefit for her own children, but her official public position was people should not do this and they should get beyond this. over and over i encountered beliefs from people who were relatively affluent, educated, either successful or clearly on their way to becoming successful. and they would espouse strange beliefs that maybe they felt it was making them look interesting or sophisticated. i would later term these luxury beliefs, ideas and opinions that inflict cost on lower classes. these beliefs will win a lot of

accolades and plaudits from their peers, but then behind the scenes, as these beliefs get implemented into policy or the culture at large, these can have downstream detrimental consequences. i mean, even as a simple example of the ways that -- like, a recent example of this would be the defund the police movement. there was a massive survey, a representative sample of americans collected data in 2020. when they broke down the responses by income category, the highest income americans were by far the most supportive of defunding the police, and the lowest income americans were the least supportive. and yet defunding the police became a very popular movement, and as a result a lot of police departments across the country did reduce funding. and it cultivated an attitude of

suspicion towards law enforcement, and subsequently homicides increased, thefts skyrocketed. it is funny, when poor people, marginalized people, when they were murdered or victimized, they got folded into these aggregate statistics. you would open up some newspaper and it was a year-over-year increased between 2021 and 2022. but whenever member of what i call the luxury believe class, someone with a college degree who has a nice white-collar job, when they get killed they actually get profile pieces. in the media there were two high-profile cases. one journalist killed in philadelphia, a tech journalist killed in san francisco. as a result of street crime, or something similar. and they received these profile pieces. they were identified by name and

spoke about how much these people met and so on. i thought, ok, my impression of this is if a bunch of peasants get killed, they are just a statistic. but one of the aristocrats get killed, they get a glowing obituary, this very glowing newspaper article about them. so even when those luxury beliefs do end up inflicting costs on the upper classes, they still treat it differently and they are still conferred status. peter: rob henderson, we have about two minutes left. i want to get a quick response from this quote toou book. a question i wrestled with in the early stages of writing was, who is this book for? whenever i thought about comfortable upper and upper middle-class people reading it, quite frankly, it made my stomach turn. mr. henderson: well, that was something i wrestled with all throughout the book, was, who is it for, who is the audience? it is something a lot of authors

think about. ultimately, this book is for people who go to college. people who are concerned around issues like childcare, class, and social mobility in america. and those are the kinds of people who read and buy books. but the other thing is i wrote this book to be accessible. it is not full of jargon. i have a phd, but i did not write it in a highfalutin, byzantine language. it's written to essentially be -- i thought about someone like me at age 12 or 13. some curious open-minded 13-year-old kid who is maybe going through difficulty in their own lives. if somehow they managed to pick up this book, that maybe the story would grab them and they could come away with something from the book as well. and so

>> i wrote it to be readable and not a lot of academics with advanced degrees do that. there is something for everyone, whether you are interested in how the other half lives or social mobility and interested in health care. or if you want to read a story of someone who managed, despite setbacks and obstacles, to find a way up and share my observations. something for everyone. >> is that your picture on the cover? >> yes, that is me on the bicycle i received for my birthday. i tell that story in the second or third chapter. my birthdays were never

celebrated in the foster house. so that was a special moment for me. >> he reported that in 1960 % were two-parent households. you say cldod trauma is not d because it leads to lower income, higher rates of addictioorrime. it is bad because of the first-hand experiences of the kids going through it. it is bad beusit is bad. even if stable and secure homes had nompact on attainment, success and so on, they are worth promoting it safe -- a safe and happy childhood is good. the book is called troubled, the

author, rob henderson. thank you for your time. >> thank you. ♪ >> all q&a programs are available on our website or as a podcast on c-span now app. >>n update on the ieachment of alejandro mayorkas. bolton is reporting by johnson has sent a lette to chuck humer that house managers plan present articles of impeachment to the senate april 10 that couldottially trigger the trial process to start the next day. the letter says the charges are wended and goes ono say, we urge you to set -- scheduled a trial of the matter

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