Sharing Family Values

JAMES SCHNEPF FOR TIME
Carter, left, grew up in and out of foster care. She hopes the skills she learns from Mahmoud, center, will keep her kids home

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Still, people like Ayesha Mahmoud are rare. Mahmoud, 58, quit being a foster mother 15 years ago because she was disappointed by the lack of contact between children and birth mothers. Today she hosts Nettie Carter, 28, and two of Carter's four children in her tidy, modest home in Milwaukee, Wis. As with any family there are tensions, but there is also a strong bond, particularly between Mahmoud and Charles, 11, who loves to solve puzzles with her help. "I introduce him as my grandson," says Mahmoud, who has raised four kids of her own. "That's how it feels to us."

Karin Niemuth, a social worker who helps run the program in Milwaukee, says mentors like Mahmoud are often the first real mother figures for program participants. "[These mothers] never had the experience themselves of growing up with a healthy parent-child relationship," she says.

Anna Sangermano knows from firsthand experience what such programs can do. Now 40, she says she began drinking and doing drugs at 13, dropped out of her Marin County, Calif., high school in the 11th grade and began living on the streets at 20. She smoked so much methamphetamine that her teeth rotted. The county took away two of her sons and placed them in foster care. Finally, in 1999 Sangermano entered drug treatment and then the home of Joyce and George Parker. During her nine months with the Parkers, she got her driver's license, her GED and dentures. She also enrolled her youngest son in preschool and signed up for a welfare-to-work program. Today Sangermano lives with her son in a two-bedroom apartment, works part-time and is taking college classes. She hopes to bring the two older boys home from foster care soon. "This program helped save my life," she says. "And helped me be a part of my kids' life."