Month: February 2022

Civic Blog 2: Foster Care Continued…

Welcome back to this week’s civic issue blog. We’re continuing our discussion of the heartbreaking issue that is the American Foster Care system. Trying to narrow down the last two posts of this civic issues blog onto two key flaws within the system is near impossible because there are so many. I want to narrow it down to the common roots of the problems.

First, let’s recall some facts from the previous blog… According to Foster America, as many as 70 percent of youth in the juvenile justice system have been in the foster care system. Not to mention that one-third of homeless young adults were previously in foster care. To add to it, due to our country’s mistreatment of black and white families, black children are twice as likely as white children to wind up in foster care which foils them onto the conveyor belt of other broken systems. Going down this line of broken systems breaks children apart and there is absolutely nothing they can do about it.

For more reference of just how badly the system is failing, Foster America gives the statistics:

• • 1 in 8 American children is abused or neglected by age 18

  • 1 in 17 kids enters foster care

  • The rate of foster care placement increases to 1 in 9 for Black children and 1 in 7 for Native American children

  • Upwards of 70% of youth involved in the juvenile justice system have been involved in the child welfare system

  • 50% of foster youth will not graduate from high school on time

  • 48% of girls in foster care become pregnant by age 19

  • 60% of child trafficking victims have histories in foster care

  • 33% of homeless young adults were previously in foster care

  • Kids in foster care are 4x more likely than other children to attempt suicide

                            

The mission of Foster America is to hire qualified and committed employees to design better protocols and innovative ideas to rebuild the foster care system. They have thought about their approach as starting from the ground up because of everything within the system that needs changed. The first issue that they address is the need to attract applicable families to fostering. They used the example of Adam Williams who used his marketing and human-centered design skills to help Rhode Island increase the number of foster families recruited and licensed in the state by 25 percent. With this, he also decreased the number of foster children placed in orphanage-like institutions by 30 percent. Foster America believes that there are good families out there, it just takes a little creativity to find them.

Foster America not only has tactics that they use to reel the good families in, but they also have a written out plan for them once they get there. They have an 18 month program that is required for families to complete before getting licensed to be assigned to foster children. This program has proven to be successful and has been implemented into many agencies’ licensing process. Foster America will continue to educate people about the faults of the foster care system and work to improve it because they believe that every child deserves a safe and loving family.

Next let’s talk about once a kid is in the system, what happens then? Well, aacap.org does a nice job of capturing what the system says life for the kids could look like and how it is organized. They state that reunification of children with their parents is often the desired outcome for foster care placement. Unless, their parental rights have been terminated due to abuse cases etc. aacap.org refers to making decisions about the future of a child in foster care as permanency planning. They state that the options include:

• returning the child to his/her birth parents
• termination of parental rights (a formal legal procedure) to be followed, hopefully, by adoption
• Long-term care with foster parents or relatives

As the system varies from state to state, most states encourage efforts to support the birth parents to provide them with needed service. In the long run, this is suppose to help them recover to be able to care for the kids. Oftentimes, when parental rights get terminated most states will try to place children with a relative.

One of the biggest issues when kids get enter into the system is getting the help they need while being in it. Being placed in a foster home is not a solution to all of the lingering problems surrounding the child and the foster parents. Yes, they do get temporary placement, but it does not put all of the other factors on hold. aacap.org highlights some things to consider when thinking about the challenges the children face which includes:

• blaming themselves and feeling guilty about removal from their birth parents
• wishing to return to birth parents even if they were abused by them
• feeling unwanted if awaiting adoption for a long time
• feeling helpless about multiple changes in foster parents over time
• having mixed emotions about attaching to foster parents
• feeling insecure and uncertain about their future
• questioning positive feelings for foster parents

These are challenges that these children will face for life. During their time in foster care, they should have access to counseling and regulate check-ups with their social worker to make sure everything in the home they were placed in is going okay.

Some challenges that the foster parents face include:

Challenges for foster parents include:

• understanding mixed feelings toward the child’s birth parents
• recognizing their difficulties in letting the child return to birth parents
• dealing with the complex needs (emotional, physical, etc.) of children in their care
• working with sponsoring social agencies
• finding needed support services in the community
• dealing with the child’s emotions and behavior following visits with birth parents

There are many other challenges the foster parents will face, some even specific to the kid they are assigned to.

In comments, tell me something you want to know or already know about the foster care system.

Thanks for reading!
-Nevaya

https://www.foster-america.org

https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Families/FFF-Guide/Foster-Care-064.aspx

The United States Foster Care System

The United States Foster Care System is broken. It is heart breaking hearing stories from kids who have to experience it. I have been interested in this topic for quite some time, and I wish that I could say that it is progressively getting better, but it’s not. The foster care system is a very complex issue that seems impossible to solve, but starting from the bottom up will give these kids a better chance to succeed.

According to Childrensrights.org article, “Foster Care,” in 2017, more than 690,000 kids spent time in U.S. foster care. Among those children, 69,000 of them were taken from their parents whose parental rights have been legally terminated, and 17,000 lived in the system until they age out. The article states that only thirteen percent of the kids will get adopted into a permanent family. In 2020, on any given day, there are approximately 443,000 kids in the U.S. foster care system who are waiting to be adopted. The United States’ foster care system is broken; children in foster care are abused and forced into harmful living situations with little hope of being adopted.

The amount of time that a child stays with a foster family depends on the situation. A key goal of foster care programs is to ensure that children live in stable, lifelong families since secure attachment to at least one parenting adult is crucial to healthy child development and well-being. The foster care system fails to support their purpose by sending children with families that are abusive and by tearing families apart. The likelihood of families staying together through foster care is slim. The system does not hesitate to separate siblings from each other with little to no contact. People need to fight for these families to prevent them from being torn apart. The amount of money foster parents are paid varies by state and number of kids. The average amount of money a foster family is paid is about 40,000 dollars per year.

 

According to Childwelfare.gov’s article, “Statistics on Child Abuse and Neglect in Out-of-Home Care,” the number of children in foster care who received a child protective services investigation for abuse has raised ten percent from 2013-2017 (3,184,000) to 2017-2020 (3,501,000). The national rounded number of confirmed victims increased 2.7 percent from 2013 (656,000) to 2017 (674,000). The article states that this is too many and that the foster system needs to recognize if people are unfit to foster a child. Rita Price, a reporter for The Columbus Dispatch, tells the horror story of James Ferguson who is in prison for abusing his foster children. The article refers to the children as the “Ferguson Children,” and states that while placed in a foster home they were hit with baseball bats, burned with irons, starved, and forced to drink urine. She states, “The siblings’ statements and testimony, along with the scars on their bodies, eventually helped put their adoptive parents in prison. James and Vonda Ferguson were convicted during separate trials in Clark County Common Pleas Court in 2008 and 2009 and are serving sixty-five-year sentences for what investigators called some of the most horrific child abuse central Ohio had seen. Price explains that the Ferguson’s seemed like the perfect foster family at first, they went to church and had their life together. The eldest child, Julius, states that the abuse started with only two weeks of being there. He vividly states that he and his siblings were beaten until they bled, put inside a running clothes dryer, hit with hammers, and sometimes even dropped over a banister. Julius claims that the Ferguson’s used to “duct-tape us all to a bed and force us to watch them perform sexual activities and would sometimes involve my younger siblings.” Price states that the foster parents warned all of the kids that if they were to ever say anything to anyone that they would kill them. Price states that Julius described to her that they came up with plans of exactly how they were going to kill them. Price states that situations like the Ferguson case are happening throughout the United States, and the way to prevent it is to repair the broken foster care system by implementing more check-ins and better background checks.

Every state has different requirements as to how often a social worker is supposed to meet with their assigned foster children. The timeline trend is for visits to take place every thirty days. Every thirty days for a child who is being abused is too much of a time gap. Foster children are abused every day, and social workers need to check in with them more frequently until adoption.  Many people who seem applicable to be foster parents are deceiving. Assuming that the children are safe is the biggest mistake a social worker could make. A part of the system needs to be implemented to check with the kids one-on-one to make sure that their assigned home is stable. Not all foster families are bad, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.

According to Richard Wexler, a writer for Youthtoday.org, the social workers need to “Basically live with the family, without actually living with them. The social worker needs to put themselves in the child’s shoes and then evaluate if it’s a safe environment.” It has been found that children who are abused in foster care will come out of it scared and will struggle to trust anyone. Wexler states that abused or not, once a foster child reaches the age of eligibility for emancipation they are likely to be emancipated. He claims that one in four foster children who reach this age will be emancipated, and 55 percent of them will become homeless. Wexler explains that this defeats the purpose of foster care. He states that foster care is supposed to provide a home for children who cannot live with their biological parents; instances like this show that the foster care system is broken.

The United States’ foster care system is an abusive process that needs to be remodeled because it is destroying thousands of children’s lives. America’s foster care system can be rebuilt and improved. Foster care needs to help kids find a safe home and live a happy life. A healthy relationship between children and their social worker needs to be formed, the social workers need to focus on ways of preventing abuse, and the assessments of the foster family needs to strengthen. Ensuring that these things are put into the system will improve foster kids’ lives. 

The system negatively effects so many children’s lives. It’s time to do something to fix it.