Increasing Awareness: Foster Care in the United States

Part of increasing overall awareness is fostering a sense of mindfulness about worldly events. A few of our blogs will focus on some such realities, not to bring people down but to help offer a sense of perspective and action ideas for change.

Today we will focus on the foster care system, which has many excellent people working to make it better but is still increasingly overrun and under-funded. Some staggering statistics:

• In the year 2007, when we have the last reliable statistics, 1% of the population of children and youth had experienced substantiated neglect or abuse.
• At any given point in 2007, .7% of the U.S. population was in foster care.
• 57% of children and youth in foster care meet clinical criteria for a mental health disorder.
• The most alarming of all: Less than 3% of kids who grow up in foster care will go on to graduate from college.

African Americans and other ethnic minorities are also overrepresented in foster care, and once a child enters their teen years, they will likely age out of foster care rather than find a forever home. Teens tend to go to group homes or residential treatment facilities, where once again, there are great people on staff working to make a difference in their lives, but the kids themselves report that they need more: more attention, more love, more belief that they will be able to succeed.

In Colorado, groups of foster youth have worked in recent years to pass legislation that helps put them in a better situation when they exit foster care, like requiring case workers to present them with a birth certificate and a social security card in order to close their file and being able to have more of a voice in court about what happens to them. The kids are working to make changes for themselves, but as a society, we can still do better.

Have you ever thought about fostering, adopting, or even mentoring a child or teen in your community? If you have, pursue it. It makes such a difference to these children and youth to have even one caring adult in their life, someone they can count on to believe in them unconditionally. Remember - "To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world." (Cortez)