The disrepair of our foster care system has long signaled—to those paying attention—our failure as a first world county, as a superpower nation, the supposed “greatest nation in the world,” to properly care for its citizens. People from all shades of the political spectrum chime in with their various solutions when the issue is raised, but all agree on one thing: when our children don’t have safe homes and warm beds, we’ve failed them. When organizations like New York Foundling (http://www.nyfoundling.org) are helping more displaced children than the American government, we’re doing something seriously wrong.
If you think this position is an exaggeration, imagine this:
According to childrensrights.org, over the past year about “650,000 [US] children spent some time in out-of-home care.” That number is equal to the number of people U.S. News reported experienced homelessness on any given day in 2011. It’s 50,000 people more than die of heart-disease each year (only 600,000)—heart disease being the nation’s leading cause of death.
Some more unsettling facts:
Upwards of 400 thousand children are living in some form of foster care every day.
and:
According to acf.hhs.gov each child who enters out of home care stays in the system for an average of 2 years, which may sound low, but which is extremely high as an average. It indicates that at least ten percent remain longer than five years, and a lucky few remain for a year or less.
As tempting as it is to ignore these numbers, the facts remain, and the long term psychological and emotional affects of foster care, especially under the current system, are disturbing at best. If the foster care system was the flu, so many children would have been impacted and would be suffering its symptoms that the US would have declared a pandemic.
So, if becoming a foster parent or adopting a child sounds like a great opportunity and feels right, consider adopting regionally, not just internationally. Children are struggling for homes all over the world, but it can be easy to forget about what’s going on right down the street, or across town, when the struggles of local children aren’t seen everyday or displayed in the news.
Here is a list of US states with the most children in out-of-home care as of 2010. If you’re considering adoption, check to see if a state on the list that’s near you.
1. California (57,000+)
2. Texas (29,000+)
3. New York (27,000+)
4. Florida (19,000+)
5. Illnois (18,000+)
With numbers like these in such a wide variety of locations, everyone lives near a state with a foster care system at critical capacity.
