Cayla+C’s+2017+OpEd+Article


 * The Guilt and Innocence of the Foster Care System **

In Houston, Texas a boy is sent out to gather the mail and runs. He runs, and doesn’t look back. He is 11 years old, and he is sick and tired of foster care. He is not alone. Of the 400,000 American children in foster care today, 52,000 will attempt to run away from their foster parents.* The foster care system was built to help children in need by removing them from the maltreatment of their homes and relocating them with healthier, foster families. While this system has helped millions of children find families, in cases where it can’t work, it fails miserably. Luckily, these cases are rare, but the detriment it has on these children affects, and often ruins, the rest of their lives.

There is one thing that the foster care system got right: children need families. The Child Welfare System claims to be an expert of this, but real families are not always provided to children who need them. After all, fostering a child doesn’t include raising it, resulting in only 54% of foster parents considering adoption. To this 54%, the system works perfectly. It gives them the chance to have children in their home with the option of raising them if need be. However, it is the other near half, who are not looking to parent, where problems may arise. Foster parents aren’t bound by contract to continue sheltering a child should the child’s situation worsen, and can choose to no longer foster at any time, for any reason. Foster parents who do this often have good reason for choosing to do so, but what is family without commitment? This results in children, usually those over the age of 9 capable of exhibiting bad behavior, being bounced from house to house with nowhere to call home. This lack of stability is the last thing children taken from their parents need. The psychological damage inflicted on these children, even if the situation is only temporary, burdens them into adulthood. According to a survey conducted by the California Office of Research in 2011, 36% of children who “age out” of the system will end up homeless, 25% will be diagnosed with ADHD, and 50% will be incarcerated by the age of 20.* In an interview, prison inmate and former foster care child “April” (alias) confesses that her first family was her prison family. “In prison, I never discussed anything like foster care,” April elaborates, “I was a chameleon. I fit in.”*

Of course, there are amazing foster parents who do their best to raise a child, even if the child is to be reunited with their parent. However, being a foster parent should be a commitment and is often very difficult, so those who are not ready to foster should refrain from doing so for the child’s sake. Foster care shouldn’t be a way for people to test their parenting skills or to satisfy a false sense of social justice. It shouldn’t be, but 46% of foster parents use it as such. Even if a foster parent “tries their best,” by relocating the child they’re supposed to love, they are just one more crack in the child’s psyche.

For these children, the unadoptables, the forgotten, there is little hope. For them, the foster care system is broken, and as of now, there is no way to repair it. America relies heavily on foster care as the only way to take care of these children for one reason, it’s economical. Foster care relies on the empathy of the public, of which there is no shortage, and otherwise pays for itself. Through this system, children are paid for by their foster parents, so little funding is needed. Previously used methods of orphanages and group homes have died out not because they are bad for children, but because they are expensive. Foster care, instead, has been turned to as the answer to all of the Child Welfare System’s problem. Or it would be, if it worked.

*[|__http://www.sor.govoffice3.com/vertical/Sites/%7B3BDD1595-792B-4D20-8D44-626EF05648C7%7D/uploads/Foster_Care_PDF_12-8-11.pdf__] State Survey of California Prisoners by the California Senate Office of Research, December 2011 **[|__http://www.sor.govoffice3.com/vertical/Sites/%7B3BDD1595-792B-4D20-8D44-626EF05648C7%7D/uploads/Foster_Care_PDF_12-8-11.pdf__] Foster Care facts by the Children’s Action Network