Some children don’t have loving homes that they can call their own. For whatever reason, the parents of these children are not able to provide for them and neither is their extended family. When this occurs, the child will be placed into the foster care system.
More than 250,000 children are placed into the foster care system in the United States every year.
Aging Out of Foster Care
We are making some promises to these children when we place them into foster care. We are telling them that they are getting the chance to create a better life for themselves. They are promised a safe home where they can have a family that can be called their own. For many children, these promise are just empty words that have no meaning. As the statistics show, many foster kids are aging out of the system and have nowhere to turn.
- More than 23,000 children will age out of the US foster care system every year.
- After reaching the age of 18, 20% of the children who were in foster care will become instantly homeless.
- Only 1 out of every 2 foster kids who age out of the system will have some form of gainful employment by the age of 24.
- There is less than a 3% chance for children who have aged out of foster care to earn a college degree at any point in their life.
- 7 out of 10 girls who age out of the foster care system will become pregnant before the age of 21.
- The percentage of children who age out of the foster care system and still suffer from the direct effects of PTSD: 25%.
- Tens of thousands of children in the foster care system were taken away from their parents after extreme abuse.
- 8% of the total child population of the United States is represented by reports of abuse that are given to authorities in the United States annually.
- In 2015, more than 20,000 young people — whom states failed to reunite with their families or place in permanent homes.
One of the biggest problems that social workers face today is a stigma that people have regarding what they do. Many people see child protection workers as vengeful, hateful people who just want to take kids away from their parents and families. The sad truth is that over 6 million children are at a high risk of being abused by their families annually and this is represented by the over 3 million reports of possible abuse that are filed every year. We know that children thrive in families and that is why we want kids to be placed into foster care instead of an institution. The problem is that the temporary solution of foster care has become a permanent solution and 10% of the kids that are placed into the system age out of it without every really getting the chance to heal.
