The United State Of America Foster Care System

Raising children is one of the most important responsibilities in any society. Today, working parents have many options, but what about those children who have neither a mother nor father? What about those children who come from broken and abusive homes? In such cases there are often few choices. Parentless children may be placed in orphanages or in foster homes. Ideally, foster care offers children more personalized attention than would normally be available at a public or private situation. However, orphanage care is notoriously uneven. While some children are indeed in loving homes, others find themselves neglected or

More than likely that title was alarming to most people because how can one be “too old” for food and a place to say? Imagine being somewhere from the time you were a toddler, then all of a sudden your eighteenth birthday comes and suddenly you are kicked out of the only place you have had to call home for 18 years. That’s how it is for a teenager in the foster care system. It doesn’t matter how good you thought your life was, good behavior, or love, for some turning 18 means freedom, cigarettes, army, voting e.tc however, for children in the system 18 means homeless, hungry and alone.

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.

America has a staggering problem among its youths and is in desperate need of help. Every day, young, innocent children are being abused. Unfortunately, this rate only seems to be growing as the foster care system is becoming flooded with children who need help. According to the website, Foster Club, a child is entered into the foster care system every two minutes. The reasoning for a child being placed in foster care can range, but mostly it is because of abuse. These traumatizing experiences and memories can hinder a person for the rest of their life. These kids find themselves in a terrible situation and learn ways to cope with the pain. It can be easy to judge their behaviors but for somebody with a normal life we can never understand the trials that they have had to live through. Fortunately, the psychological damage that is done can be reversed but in order to understand this fully we first need to know the negative psychological affects abuse can have on a person.

Donella H. Meadows defines a system as a “set of elements or parts that is coherently organized and interconnected in a pattern or structure that produces a characteristic set of behaviors” (Meadows, 2014, p. 188). The federal definition of foster care is a “24-hour substitute care for children placed away from their parents or guardians and for whom the State agency has placement and care responsibility” (Johnson, 2004). Therapeutic foster care is a subsystem of the suprasystem which is foster care. The Quality Foster Care Services Act defines therapeutic foster care as foster care which is highly effective in placing children with serious medical, psychological, emotional, and social needs into a home in which foster parents are specially trained to address the needs and challenges of the children (U.S. Senators Baldwin and Portman Lead Effort to Improve Foster Care Services for America’s Most Vulnerable Youth, 2014).

The foster care system exists in order to enhance the lives of children whose parents were deceased rather than because of abuse today. Our outlook, principles, and ways of being concern for and protecting abused or neglected children and looking after families has shifted greatly throughout history. In this paper I will discuss and inform the readers on the three main components. The first part will discuss the foundation and growth of the foster care system as time pass. Secondly, describe the contemporary state of the system within the United States, including pertinent statistics. Lastly, considering future guidelines intended for the system, including ways in which the system can progress throughout the time.

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.

Many people across the country may not be familiar with what foster care actually is. Foster care is a full- time substitute care of children outside their own home by people other than their biological or adoptive parents (“Foster” par. 1). These parents may have their children taken away from them for many different reasons. There are also

The term foster care commonly refers to all out-of-home placements for children who cannot remain with their birth parents. Children may be placed with non-relative foster families, with relatives, in a therapeutic or treatment foster care home, or an institution or a group home. Nearly half of all children in foster care live with non-relative foster families, and about one quarter reside with relatives. More than 800,000 children spent some time in the foster care system in 2001, with approximately 540,000 children in foster

The outlook for children in foster care in the U.S. is cause for alarm (Zetlin, MacLeod, & Kimm, 2012). Foster youth, otherwise known as youth who are ward of the court, are one of the most at risk populations in areas such as physical and emotional health, juvenile delinquencies and educational achievement. This is primarily due to factors such as disruptive a history of abuse, school changes, social stigma and isolation, lack of educational supports, disproportionately high rates of special education services, and exclusionary disciplinary actions (Gallegos & White, 2013). Specific to education, foster youth are twice as likely to be suspended and almost four times as likely to be expelled on a national scale (Courtney, Terao, & Bost, 2004). Additionally, approximately 30-50% of children in care qualify for special education compared with 11.5% children not in foster care (Zetlin, MacLeod, & Kimm, 2012).

A lot of articles about the foster care system discuss how mental illness affects foster children, how trauma could lead to problems in caring for the foster child, and how an increased level of movement can affect their willingness to be social, which are all topics that students that are in the social sciences and humanities discuss on a day to day basis. For example, in the article “Changes in Externalizing and Internalizing Problems of Adolescents in Foster Care” by McWey, Cui, and Pazdera (2010), they used the National Survey of Child and Adolescent well-being longitudinal study to discuss the externalizing and internalizing problems of children in the foster care system based on type of maltreatment, gender and age. They used a

Without the proper form of a “home” or better yet a family, children are not well equipped for life and the struggles they may face. The foster system is wonderful for protecting children from strife they may encounter with their biological parents, but it can do more harm than good. “‘The longer kids stay in foster care the more moves they have, the worse they become socially and emotionally’ Blanco said” (Chavers 9). States around the country are now trying to figure out a way to find permanent, safe, stable homes for youth in foster care (Chavers 1).

In 2014, more than 22,000 young people aged out of foster care without permanent families, says abcnews.com/fostercare.com. This is only one of the many problems in the foster care system. Not only did they get aged out of the foster care but some didn’t get jobs and/or became homeless. "The child-welfare system failed Logan Marr in every possible way," said Richard Wexler, the executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. "They failed her by ignoring her cries of abuse and they failed her by letting her die in that foster home." These are just two reasons why I think Ponyboy should stay with his family because they show him a type of protection and care and responsibility the system can’t.

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

So many children in the U.S. are in the foster care system. Either from teenage pregnancy, their pregnancy was an accident, or their parents have died and no one was there to take care of them. So this leads to some children in the system not being in good care. Some are being mistreated, beaten, starved, or sexually abused, it all counts as one of the most common dangerous situations in the system. From the systems background and policies there are so many limitations on what you can and can’t do for children.