A Families-First Approach to Foster Care - NYTimes.com

A Families-First Approach to Foster Care - NYTimes.com

It’s difficult to change systems even when they are widely acknowledged to be broken. That’s the situation facing the nation’s foster care system. According to the government’s most recent estimate, there were roughly 424,000 young people in foster care as of Sept. 30, 2009. Each year, about 30,000 of them turn 18 (or 21 in some states) and “age out” of foster care. What happens to them?

The results are not encouraging, according to a major study published in 2010. Although there are many wonderful foster parents and many foster care alumni who overcome tough odds, most struggle to live successfully as adults. By age 23 or 24, fewer than half of the former foster care youths in the study were working. Close to a quarter had no high school diploma or equivalency degree and only 6 percent had completed a two- or four-year post-secondary degree. Nearly 60 percent of males had been convicted of a crime and 77 percent of females had been pregnant.

When you are dealing with complicated social, emotional and mental health problems, there are no easy answers. But today there is a promising alternative to foster care that is gaining traction — although it faces an uphill battle because it represents a departure from long-held assumptions in our child welfare system. The idea is to help youths return to their original families wherever it is possible to do so safely by providing their parents, or in some cases other relatives, with an extensive array of in-home support services.