Foster Home: A Case Study

Every year in the United States, hundreds of children and adolescents are taken from their parents and primary caregivers and placed in out-of-home care situations due to issues in their homes and family lives which contribute to unsafe living conditions. These children and adolescents often face many health, behavioral, developmental, and psychological issues.

When an adolescent comes into for therapy there is really never an easy task of finding out what is going on. Adolescent that come in who are part of the foster care system will add another degree of challenges. Children and adolescents that are put into the foster care system are not there because they choose to be, they are there due to some event in their life putting them there.

As of 2016 there were nearly a half million children in the foster care system, with roughly 25,000 “aging-out” each year (Ahmann, 2017). Most adolescents “age out” of the system with no one to mentor or serve as a caring parent figure. Foster youth are in dire need of long-term adult role models to guide them to achieve success. According to Ahmann, 50% of foster youth left “the system” without a high-school degree, as well as with having higher rates of PTSD, and depression (p. 43). Ahmann presented that research has proven teenagers, in general, that have quality relationships from adults able to provide support, do better than those that do not. If research has shown efficacy in supportive adult figures in a teen’s life then one can conclude that foster youth would also benefit. Foster children are at a disadvantage a soon as they enter “the system” so giving them resources proven positive is vital to their future success.

This paper is a summary of what research has been done in the field of foster care. It will focus on foster care social workers, foster care parents, children in foster care, etc. In this work there will also be reference to aspects of adoption and foster care together. This paper will encompass all parties affected by foster care and will ultimately talk about what qualities are expected of social workers who work in foster care.

According to the 2015 Adoption and foster care Analysis and reporting system (AFCARS), 427,910 children were in the US foster care, making foster care one of the social issues in the USA. The US Department of Health and Human services (HHS) is working on this social issue for past few years, but is still not getting positive results — every year population of Foster care is increasing by 50,000 youths. The statistics about the Foster care system is changing every day. Some things that people don’t know about foster care is that they will not only lose their children—they had lost parental rights and had broken the laws, therefore this can lead to a punishment. Foster care has many laws related to it.. Once the parents had lost the children,

An adult’s psychological development depends on one’s childhood experiences with adults and their capability of providing nurturance, protection, trust, and security to the developing child. Children with current and previous ties to the foster care system were found to have behavioral, emotional, and social well-being issues. The United States averages more than 400,000 children in foster care during the year. Amongst these 400,000 children, as many as 50% have developmental disorders or psychiatric diagnoses (Hutchinson). Children placed within the foster care system are more likely to be found to have mental health issues due to the inadequacy

Foster Parent One: Shelly was born and raised in Avery, TX. She is the biological daughter of Delores Jackson and David Monsiviaz. Shelly was adopted by her maternal aunt and uncle, Eura and Woodrow Hicks at the age of 3, Shelly’s mother was killed in a car accident and her father was not accept by the family due to his ethnicity. Shelly reported she was informed by her adoptive parents that her biological father was dead as well. When Shelly was an adult she searched and located him, however she has never contacted him because she feels that should have been his job.

Residence for children who have been a victim to abuse, neglect or other matters in their family that put them in harms way. This is what the foster care system was designed for. It keeps these children safe and provides a temporary home until the parents get their life together and prove themselves or they do not, and the children get adopted by loving families.

Foster care is a growing epidemic in the United States. Youth who are involved in foster care are more likely to have contact with the criminal justice system, become addicts, and not be able to find employment. As a society we try to care for the child as best as we can. The average cost to help provide for a child is roughly $11,000 per year. The rate of a child being neglected in foster care is much higher than a child living with biological parents that’s being neglected.

Some awful things we hear about the foster care system makes the system seem like it is awful, but in reality the system was created to help the foster youth. Some examples would be that the system does not help after a child has entered into a foster home, but the system pays a monthly supplement to the foster parents to pay for clothes and medical expenses. Despite the common belief that foster care is an awful system, but in actuality there are programs within the the foster care system that help youth and the main goal is to reunite the foster children with their biological parents.

Professor Martha L. Coulter is a professor in the Department of Community and Family Health, College of Public Health at the University of South Florida. She is also the Director of the James and Jennifer Harrell Center for the Study of Family Violence, a position she has held since the year 1994. Her passion is maternal and child health with a devoted career to promoting the lives of children and families. She initially started out as a social worker, after receiving her MSW from Tulane University, but developed a joint interest in maternal and child health and child maltreatment after working with a program called Cripple Children Services in Louisiana. She subsequently got her MPH from the University of California at Berkeley (1976) and

“I had no medical history. I had no shot records. I had nothing.” This was the response given by one of the foster caregiver participant in a qualitative research conducted by Greiner, Ross, Brown, Beal, & Sherman, 2015). Children in the foster care are among the most vulnerable population and have many health issues including chronic medical conditions and developmental delays. In addition, there is a high rate of mental health problems. As Greiner et al., 2015 depicted, children entering foster care lack organized documentation of their health history including immunization records. There are some efforts and policies in place to improve the provision of health to foster care children but they are implemented inadequately and lack coordination.

The development of foster care systems has long been an issue in the United States. It was developed as sort of a safe haven for children to go when their family life and environmental conditions were not in the best interests of the child (Lawrence, Carlson, and Egeland, 2006). As of the year 2010, there were more than 400,000 youths in the United States who were placed into foster homes (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2011). There are a number of factors that have been associated with an idea as to why so many children are placed into foster homes. Some of these factors include drug/sexual abuse, physical abuse/neglect, and researchers have even questioned poverty as a potential factor. Many of the researchers found that out of all the studies they performed, the majority of the children who entered the foster care system to begin with was because one or more guardian(s) had abused or neglected the child (Oswald, Heil, and Goldbeck, 2010). According to a controlled evaluation of child neglect, neglect refers to any situation where the child does not receive the proper supervision (maybe a dangerous environment), medical attention (the child is hurt or sick), and any form of physical, verbal, and educational care they need in a guardian (Donohue et al., 2014). Child abuse can refer to any situation where the child is in physical danger or encounters physical harm for unknown and unnecessary reasons. Some research has been completed while other studies are

Steffanie, of California, is one of the 415,129 U.S. foster children who depend on caseworkers to keep them safe in the system (AFCARS Report #22, 2015). These workers are reliant on government agencies for the support necessary to protect the hundreds of thousands of kids they are responsible for, but their needs are not always prioritized. Caseworkers should not be liable as [some] foster care systems often start them off with little training, fail to give them the resources they need, and burden them with the struggle of unmanageable caseloads and long hours on small

The study consisted of 12 parents who foster children ages 2-8 years old. The high levels of conduct problems among children in the foster care system and the added cost to families, society and services, there is a pressing need to support foster parents. Providing foster care to children with increased emotional, behavioral, and medical needs requires not only time, but patience in dealing with the child’s demands. Foster parents often voice they are unprepared to meet demand of children with increased behavioral and emotional needs and adolescents in their care. This situation can result in placement disruption, which further strains foster care resources and has negative impacts on foster children and youth. The incidence of conduct disorder