The Children’s Bureau recently announced new numbers based on the 2006 AFCARS. One of the saddest numbers was 26,000. This is the number of American children/youth who aged out of the foster care system. This number is higher than the previous year. Averaging this out, it comes to 2,167 kids per month aging out of the sytem and 71 each day. So – as you read this today, 71 more of our kids have left to fend for themselves.
If this fact does not motivate me to start working harder, I don't know what will.
I taught a segment of a college class a few weeks ago and I asked them the following questions:
How many of you are under 25? Nearly all raised their hands.
How many of you have talked to your parents or a relative in the last week? All hands stayed up.
How many of you asked that person for something in the last two weeks? Almost all hands stayed up.
I said, "I expect that most of you are fairly smart. You probably don't have a mental health diagnosis. You likely were not prenatally exposed to drugs or alcohol. You don't have a learning disability. And you probably have a healthy attachment to your parents.
Picture this, I then told them. What if this was your story: On your graduation day from high school, your parents took you to an apartment and, without a vehicle, but within walking distance of the job at McDonalds they had found for you, paid your first months rent and said, goodbye and good luck. And you never heard from them again.
How many of you would be OK today?
not a single hand went up.
I reminded them that even with all of their good beginnings, they still needed parents. And that so many foster kids have a similar thing happen to them WITHOUT all of the other good things they were fortunate enough to have had growing up.
It was a sobering time.
71 kids today.... on their own. I need to get busy.
1 comment:
I think you are taking too much of the load onto your own shoulders with this one. Although I agree that workers like you do have an impact on the numbers, I think the child welfare system itself is going to need to change before those numbers will significantly change.
The system needs to stop treating foster and pre-adoptive parents as if they are an inconvenience. Real and meaningful support needs to exist for foster and post-adoptive families. There needs to be ways families can get the help they need, without being treated like they are unreasonable.
And, when things do go wrong, the system needs to treat foster and adoptive families as if they are presumed innocent instead of assuming they are guilty of wrongdoing.
We are still fighting the legal battle over our foster daughter, seven months after we received the removal notice. Even though we have known for almost a year and a half that she won't be reunified with her birth parents, and even though the county doesn't have another home lined up for her, they've been fighting us. It doesn't even matter that our daughter (now 12 years old) has repeatedly expressed that she wants to stay and that she wants us to adopt. Although we are hoping for good news at our next hearing, this experience has left us disillusioned and discouraged. I could never recommend to anyone that they should try to adopt from foster care after this experience.
It makes me sad to say that, because I'm aware of all the kids out there who are still suffering and who will age out without a permanent and stable family.
But I realize that the personal cost to us and our family has been just too high. We think we have a chance of winning this fight for our daughter's sake, but I don't think we could put ourselves through this experience again for another child.
At this point, we have spent nearly as much in legal fees for a 12-year-old child who has significant issues as we would have spent to adopt a healthy infant from overseas.
We went down the domestic, older child route because we thought it was the "right thing" to do, for the kids, and for our country.
How wrong we were.
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