Foster Care has failed to accomplish its mission of providing temporary, safe living conditions with therapeutic services for children who cannot safely remain in their own homes.
The ultimate goal of safely reuniting children with reformed parents or else to secure alternative permanent homes for them through adoption, cannot be achieved by overbearing bureaucracies and has to be done with community effort.
So far, the most promising form of well-ordered community involvement has been through public-supported, dedicated, tax free enterprises.
Children cannot be left to spend long years in foster or group homes, where they are often moved multiple times. It places them at increasing risks of futures full of emotional, behavioral, and academic problems.
We need many more charities and organizations dedicated to serving foster youths to break this cycle of decline…give them dignity and the resources and mentors to become successful in school and in life.
Our research reveals a lack of public concern for the immensity of the problem which spawned the idea of a private publication of a progressively expanding book with very wide circulation to highlight the problem with carefully conducted interviews of former inmates of the system as well as their care givers, those attempting to educate them, the social workers trying to mentor them and the medical fraternity trying to administer to their needs.
There are unintended breakdowns in the system with administrators being overrun with demands in excess of existing foster and group home capacities, leading to lapses in supervision and the licensing of facilities to incompetent or dishonest operators who cut corners to enrich themselves at the expense of the children in their care. This was dramatically exposed recently when the Los Angeles County foster care system went into chaotic failure mode.
On a national scale, in 2012 there were about 400,000 children in foster care. 55,000 of them were in California where the system is managed at the county level. Los Angeles accounted for 18,500 of them. New York State accounted for 21,000, Florida for 19,000, Michigan for 16,000, Illinois and Pennsylvania each had around 15,000, Texas 14,000, Indiana and Arizona 13,000 and Colorado 7,000.
A foster child is instinctively taught that you don’t speak up. It’s dangerous. And don’t forget that Mom or Dad already gave up on you, so it’s best to shut your mouth or you could end up being moved again.
It should be obvious, that the avoidance of large scale abuse of young people in foster-care amounts to a national challenge.
The net result, after costing tax payers close to $40,000 per year, is that half are unemployed, those with jobs earn less than $8,000 annually, 40 percent are homeless some of the time, and only 5 percent of men and 7 percent of women had earned an associate degree. The bottom line is that 30 percent of the homeless in the United States and 25 percent of those in prison today came out of foster care.
Proponents of the existing foster care system don’t like facing the fact that, seen in totality, the foster care institution is hard at work creating our next generation of poor, homeless, criminal people.
Since no established media carries the torch for abused foster kids, this series of books is focused on compelling the public to pay attention.
The first edition will be followed by subsequent editions to bring increasing depth and insight by adding the experiences of more foster care people to keep the message vibrant and more embracing. Our hope is that this will remind the public of what foster care could be if, together, we make it happen!
We need huge public support to accomplish this mission. For more, please go to www.Facebook.com/TheFosterCareDilemma
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