I’m a foster kid who went to Yale —and I think two-parent families are more important than college
Social critic Rob Henderson went to Yale for undergrad and earned a PhD at Cambridge, but he says we place too much emphasis on degrees and diplomas.
“We give education more importance than we should,” he writes in his new book, “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class” (Gallery Books, February 20). “I had to … reach the summit of education to understand its limitations … I’ve come to understand that a warm and loving family is worth infinitely more than the money or accomplishments I hoped might compensate for them.”
Henderson, who has written for the Wall Street Journal and has a popular Substack newsletter, is best known for coining the term “luxury beliefs” — ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while inflicting costs on the lower classes.
One example is residents of an apartment building with a 24-hour doorman on the Upper East Side advocating for abolishing the police, another is the idea that education is all that people need to succeed, and that home life is secondary.
The 33-year-old uses his personal story to make broader points about class differences, the importance of family and how government social services utterly failed him.
Born in Los Angeles to a drug-addicted mother, Henderson was put in foster care at age 3.
By the time he was 17, he’d lived in ten different homes.
His upbringing was filled with poverty and violence.
He recalls his birth mother being handcuffed as he was yanked from her, packing his belongings in shoeboxes and garbage bags as he was shuffled from one foster home to the next and even his adoptive mother’s partner getting shot.
But, he persevered, entering the Air Force at age 17 in 2007, graduating with a BS in psychology from Yale in 2018 via their ROTC program, and earning a PhD in psychology from Cambridge in 2022.
“People have told me that my story has brought them to tears,” Henderson writes. “That’s never been my intention — I don’t want pity. I’m one of the lucky ones. There are many kids who have suffered far more. Some of them never recover from what they’ve endured.”
Here, he talks to The Post about his new book, family and education.
Why did you decide to go down the memoir route for your first book?
Initially it wasn’t my plan, but I have an unusual story, and I wanted to give people a sense of what life is actually like for a child and a teenager living in extreme chaos — which is illustrative of what life is like now in working class neighborhoods in America.
There aren’t that many stories like this written about the sort of people who lived in foster care and are on the margins of society.
How did the instability of foster care inform your views on the importance of family?
Oddly enough, I never really had a stable, permanent family, but the book is about the importance of family.
I lived in seven different foster homes in Los Angeles, and then I was adopted and lived through a few separations and divorces. So, in total, it was 10 different homes — without even counting my birth mother and the frequent relocations living in her car or in slum apartments.
There was a period in my adolescence from 9 to 13 where I did have two parents.
My adoptive mother entered a relationship with a woman and they raised me for a few years together.
The bright spot of my childhood was those years.
My grades were the highest they had ever been.
I was the most academically focused.
I was the least likely to get into trouble at school or with my friends.
We can focus on economics, but I would much rather focus on stability and security — the emotional rather than just the financial.
More broadly, if you look at the statistics for who ends up going to college, these are kids from two parent families.
We focus a lot on poverty and inequality, but actually, if you look at the data, it’s instability that’s much more likely to predict whether a kid goes to college or not.
A kid who lives in extreme unpredictability in his or her early life is much less likely to go to college than a kid who simply lives in a low income family.
You argue that educated people tend to overemphasize education as a fix-all for underprivileged kids. Why is that?
People involved in policy and shaping culture focus on education as the primary means of upward social mobility.
One of the points I try to make in the book is that yes, education is important.
It worked for me.
But it doesn’t necessarily work for everyone.
Even though I was always academically inclined, the level of disorder in my life was weighing me down so much that I wasn’t in a position to fully exploit my own capabilities.
The kinds of people we want to see achieve social mobility are often in extremely dire, unstable, chaotic circumstances — the kind of circumstances that I grew up in — and even if you do somehow manage to get every single one of these kids into some fancy college and they get a degree and they get a comfortable high paying job, that doesn’t necessarily make up for all of the suffering that they went through.
I’d like us to focus more on what happens before age 18 than after.
We’re so focused on, ‘Ok, they graduate high school. Do they go to college or not? And do they graduate from college?’
I argue that, through childhood and adolescence, we have to focus more on, ‘Are these kids being looked out for? Are they being nurtured? Do they have this sort of security and adequate care in order for them to achieve the things that we would like them to achieve?’
In your years at Yale and then Cambridge, what differences did you notice between your peers and yourself?
I realized, of course, these kids came from wealthier backgrounds financially.
But they also came from more comfortable backgrounds in terms of stability and structure.
I had a class where a professor administered an anonymous poll.
Out of the 20 students, 18 of them had been raised by both of their birth parents.
That just floored me because where I grew up it was zero.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the kinds of kids who go to places like Yale came from stable families, where their parents prioritize their marriage and their relationships and education.
Those early experiences at Yale were sort of the foundational experiences that led me to develop this idea of luxury beliefs.
The importance of the two-parent family is a perfect example.
A lot of people who graduate from places like Yale will express this opinion that two parents are unimportant for kids, and that all families are exactly the same.
Meanwhile, almost every single one of these elite college graduates were raised by two parents and then they themselves will go on to replicate those same experiences for their own kids.
How do you think we can work towards closing the gap between the intellectual elite class and the rest of the public?
We should be skeptical of the people who claim to speak on behalf of these communities.
Instead of looking to self proclaimed leaders of various marginalized and dispossessed groups, we need to actually ask those groups themselves.
It’s worth collecting data, looking at surveys, speaking with people — not just community leaders and activists who have their own agendas.
I saw this at Yale where someone who shares the characteristics of a historically mistreated group would claim to speak on behalf of them, but they had very little in common with them other than the way that they looked.
I want people to be a bit more skeptical of the self-proclaimed activist leaders who could be trying to push an agenda, trying to elicit sympathy, and trying to exploit people’s concerns
What is the number one lesson or take away that you hope that readers walk away with?
A lot of the things that happen in our lives aren’t our fault. But how we live our life is still our responsibility.
Once I became an adult, I realized a lot of the mistakes I had made were in large part due to my very unusual and difficult upbringing, but I couldn’t use that as an excuse anymore.
The people who caused suffering or caused difficulties in your life are not going to fix it. Only you can fix the trajectory of your life. Once I fully accepted that, things started to turn around for me.
Writer and social critic Rob Henderson’s debut book, “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class,” is out this Tuesday.
