"It Takes More Than a Village to Raise a Foster Child" Guest post by Pat Hickey
The often-repeated African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child,” may have been truer in simpler times and societies with less complicated problems.
Today, raising a child not only involves the help of extended family members, friends, teachers and other community leaders — it all too frequently involves placing a child in the care of a licensed foster care family, due to the inability of parents to provide a safe and stable home.
The problem being, these children who are removed from their parent’s home as well as away from their siblings suddenly find themselves placed in an institution or a new home feeling like they are being punished, when they are actually the victims.
The beginnings of the modern-day foster care system in America took place in the mid-1800s when minister Charles Loring Brace founded a program called Children’s Aid New York after noticing an influx of children living neglected and homeless in the streets of New York City. Children’s Aid eventually pioneered the Orphan Train Movement, which became a controversial program, placing orphaned children from overcrowded cities with families located in the Midwest.
Today, state and local social welfare and health and human services agencies play an ever-expanding role in the removal and replacement of children from families deemed unfit or unable to provide for the offspring they’ve parented.
Reasons include abuse, neglect, abandonment, and when parents are unable to provide for their children's basic needs due to issues like addiction, incarceration or illness. According to the National Institutes of Health, “There are two main ways that children enter the foster care system. The most common process is through confidential reports of suspected maltreatment to a state or county hotline, either from individuals in the community who are mandated to report suspected maltreatment (e.g., physicians, police officers, teachers) or from other concerned citizens.”
Assuming the best intentions of both agencies and individuals involved in such life-altering decisions, the pathway to removal from their parents, however inadequate or unsafe their dreadful conditions may be, it’s no great surprise that many foster children are desperate to get away from the system meant to help them.
Numerous social issues — homelessness, poverty, incarceration, mental health struggles, crime, substance use and suicide — can frequently be traced back to foster care and the separation of children from their parents.
Both liberals and conservatives as they should, have serious reservations about turning over the power and responsibility of parenting over to a bureaucratic agency, however well-intentioned its staff may be.
“When you look at outcomes of children who enter foster care versus children who stay home, just on every single metric, it’s materially worse," says David Shalleck-Klein, founder of the liberal Family Justice Law Center, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing unnecessary family separation.
“The state is now more involved that it ever has been in the raising of children," bemoaned former conservative U.S. Sen. Bob Dole. "And children are now more neglected, more abused and more mistreated than they have been at any time. I am here to tell you it does not take a village (or a government agency) to raise child. It takes a family to raise a child.”
Still, in spite of all the controversy surrounding foster care and the fact there are twice as many children needing foster homes as there are homes themselves, there are numerous and heartfelt stories that have been created by individuals in our community who exhibit a level of love and compassion that most of us may never match.
I’m talking about foster care families in Northern Nevada who provide safe and stable solutions by providing foster and adoptive homes for children and teens in Washoe County. I met with three of these families this past week and I’d like to share parts of their experience with you. There might even be someone reading this who may think, "I’d like to try and do some of what these incredible persons have done for the most precious resource any community has: its children."
The first foster care parents I'd like to highlight are Nikki and Jeff Hertzler. Nikki has been an elementary school teacher in Sparks for 20 years.
“As a teacher I looked out in a sea of faces and there’s always those kids who you want to take home because you know if you love them that will change their lives," Nikki told me.
After the Hertzlers' three biological children graduated and were out of the home, Nikki said, “We had a beautiful home and felt like we’d been so blessed.”
Her husband Jeff agreed: “We don’t want it to be empty.”
The result? The Hertzlers have housed children temporarily until they could be reunited with their families.
“In fostering, we are not just fostering a child," they said, "we are fostering the whole extended family.”
David Wendell is a local high school football coach at Damonte Ranch, and his wife Briana works in their local church in South Meadows. They have five biological children of their own, one who passed away, and one adopted son. In addition, the couple has had more than 25 foster children stay with their family for a period of time.
Briana is well-aware of the reservations people have about such a big commitment, but says, “You are never going to regret trying. You're never going to regret one day that you could help someone. And so if you get into it and for whatever reason it's not going to work, that's okay, but you can help even for a short time, whatever that looks like. Just go for it because there are a lot of resources to help.”
Priya Ahlawat had been a dentist and college professor before starting a foster care program in Washoe County she calls Robin Hood Family Ranch. She finds her new calling “less lucrative financially,” but much “more fulfilling than filling cavities.”
“What sets us apart from other foster families is that we not only ‘check the boxes’ by providing food, shelter and transportation; we go above and beyond the call of duty by providing them with experiences so they can turn around and become successful citizens instead of a burden to society or worse ,enter the pipeline to the prison system,” Ahlawat said. “I try to give them the stability they never experienced."
Tearing up, Priya tells me, “Many of them have never seen a family.”
Many of the current 600 children enrolled in foster care programs according to Washoe County Services are the result of the average 6,000 calls received a year of suspected child abuse and neglect, although many of such claims are disputed.
Accurate or not, we would do well to understand that the matter of failed parenting is neither a liberal or conservative issue. Conservatives, if they want America to be “great” again, must do a better job of modeling and creating policies that support healthy parenting. Liberals, if they want America to be “good” again, should preach what many of them practice — and support policies that strengthen the two-parent family institution, realizing it’s a better solution than all the health and human services agencies in the world a government bureaucracy can come up with.
Yes, it does takes more than a village to raise a child. It will take our children and grandchildren becoming good parents. That’s something that begins with each of us — before anyone else from the village steps in to help.
"Memo from the Middle" is an opinion column written by RGJ columnist Pat Hickey, a member of the Nevada Legislature from 1996 to 2016.This article first appeared May 18, 2025
Pat Hickey was born in Carson City and grew up in Lake Tahoe, the place where his Irish ancestors settled in the 1870s. Pat has been a ski bum, a seeker, a reporter, an assemblyman, an education advocate, and a proud parent and grandparent. His “Memo from the Middle” Sunday column is carried in the Reno Gazette Journal. Pat received his Master’s Degree from the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada.
