Kids in Crisis
Dear fellow Americans, I am writing to tell you of a crisis that we have in the foster care system.
We used to have about 400,000 children under the age of 18 in our system. Now in 2017, it has mushroomed to about 428,000, according to Childtrends.org.
Crisis in the Foster Care System
This is significant because we do not have enough foster families to take in all of these children!
Many of the kids have been placed in good foster homes, but many more are in group homes or elsewhere waiting for a chance to be in a “forever” home where they can be adopted.
For many, sadly, that never happens. They are not adopted, and when they turn 18 they “age out” of foster care.
These young people who age out are at a much higher risk of homelessness and suicide. Most of these children will not go on to college, which means that many won’t reach their full potential. Usually it takes parents who encourage and support their teenagers to help them go on to college. A child without a family has no such support system.
In Montana there are programs to help foster children who want to go on to college after high school, and I believe that there are financial aid programs for these young people as well.
I read last year in the Bozeman Chronicle that there is such a lack of foster parents in one Texas city that about 20 children in State Care there were actually living at the social workers’ offices! This means that all of the group homes, and foster homes which usually house these children were already full.
What is causing all of these children to need to be placed in foster care? Why now?
Well, it is a perfect storm of a poor economy, fewer jobs, and less money to go around. Add to this the growing frustration and desperation of young parents trying to raise their kids on a shoestring, and trying to keep the kids in school and the family together.
This year in Bozeman, Montana where I live, there were 25 homeless children in high school. If you can imagine going to high school, and trying to study, and having no place to call home, you can see that these children are severely disadvantaged. A few kids were living in cars, a few were couch-surfing…that is staying on friends’ couches, and a fortunate few found a room in a warm home.
What needs to be said at this point is that a youngster who is homeless is not responsible for his or her predicament!! The same goes for any of the thousands of kids who end up in foster care. Often an adult will think of a foster kid as, “What did you do to make this happen to you?” But rather the question is, “What happened to you?”
The child is the innocent victim in all of these cases. They are innocent, and they come from very difficult pasts that would make your hair stand on end if you heard their life stories. We need to understand that these children are not responsible for their plights! And it is up to us as a society to see what we can do to help them to find a home to live in, and then to help them to heal up. For most of these kids the healing takes years and years.
These children, all of them , are wounded and they require treatment and they all need time to heal. It is different for each child. But they are all traumatized. Some more than others.
The Tiniest Victims of Child Abuse
We know of one little girl who was found wandering around next to the interstate near a large city. She was under five and was in danger of being hit by a car. If you can think for a moment what kind of irresponsible adult left her there in the first place, you will begin to understand some of the problems of the parents/caretakers of little children who are abandoned.
This little girl is so traumatized that she cannot speak, and is still in diapers at age 4. She is with a loving family, she is improving, and the hope is that with the proper care, she will continue to heal. God Bless her! How would any of us fare in similar circumstances? Abandonment of this sort is really hard to understand!
Young families can only take so much, and for a lot of families who live in poverty the last ten years have been harder and harder financially. If you have to decide whether to pay the rent bill or spend the money on heat and food, you are already in desperate straits!
Financial Woes lead Parents to Drug Trade
Some desperate parents have turned to drugs as a way to make easy fast money, so that they can pay their bills. A tragic mistake! Some of these people do illegal things like building a meth lab in their house or barn. At this point the family is already fractured as the parents are using and selling the methamphetamine. Taking meth makes you highly irresponsible; and you are just living to get your next high with meth.
When the police move in on such a methamphetamine lab the parents are arrested for the manufacture and sale of illegal drugs. When there are children on the premises, they are always removed, taken into Child Protective Services, and are put into the foster care system. If there is a responsible family member who will take them in, known as kinship care, it is the best option for a child who has been removed.
We have a methamphetamine crisis here in Montana. In other states it might be a heroin crisis, such as in New Hampshire, or an opioid prescription drug crisis, (oxycontin, oxycodone, fentanyl ) as Florida has had. When the adults who are involved in these drug dealings are caught by police, the children are always removed from the home.
Other causes of removal of children are violence in the home, an abusive parent or other adult who threatens the child’s safety, severe alcoholism, child pornography, and mental illness, etc. Basically anything that threatens the health and safety of young children will cause them to be removed from the home.
When you take the training to become a foster parent you learn that no matter how horrible, violent or abusive the child’s birth family was, being taken from their parents is the hardest thing that these children have to deal with. They would rather be with the people they know, no matter how rough it is, than to be taken from them.
When Children are Removed from Home
There is a great video, called “Removed” on You Tube, produced by Nathanael and Christina Matanick, which shows a dysfunctional family with two children. The male adult is abusive to the mom and the children, and eventually the school sees the bruises on the little girl, age 9, the authorities are notified, and the police move in and raid the home.
In the movie we see the man being caught and hand-cuffed, the mother being apprehended also by police, and the oldest child making a run for it. She is caught by Child Welfare people, put in a police car, and her baby brother is placed in another police car.
I really recommend watching “Removed’. www.ReMovedfilm.com. It is from the little 9 year old girl’s point of view, and shows her terror at being driven away, separated from all of her family. We are taught in foster care training that when the kids come to us they are all grieving; they are all wounded. They are all in some kind of a survival mode, as they are just children trying to cope in a disaster scenario.
Think about 428,000 traumatized children under the age of 18 in America. Think if we as a nation can abide this injustice to our youth.
Realize that Russia has approximately 600,000 kids in foster care and in orphanages. This is a lot more than we have, but Russia has had severe political upheavals for a hundred years. They also have had so much more poverty than we have had here in the United States.
Both of our countries have too many children in foster care! I surmise that it is largely due to poor economies, and also because of mental illness and substance abuse. Let us pray for all of these children! May they be healed of their traumas and may they become useful adults who can contribute to society!
If we don’t help these children they will fill our prisons, and we will be the reason.