INFLUENCES ON FOSTER CARE Influences on Foster Care

Influences on Foster Care

Introduction

Foster care denotes a situation in which an individual is cared for outside the parental home, in an individual family, group setting, or other children's institution. Although many youngsters may spend their entire childhood in foster care, this situation is not intended to be permanent. It is estimated that one in twenty American children will at some time need the special help offered by foster care, even for a short period. Foster care services come under the heading of child welfare, which is concerned with the well being of children and problems of child-rearing, such as abuse, neglect, abandonment, and teenage pregnancy.

Today there are more than 130,000 licensed foster families in the United States. These families are supervised by child welfare agencies and paid for the basic needs of the child in their care. Some families spend their entire lives caring for foster children, and some eventually adopt them. Some offer only emergency care, for example, a few nights or weeks of shelter for a homeless teenager. Social workers conduct home studies of foster families before they are allowed to care for children. This paper discusses different sort of influences on foster care.

Discussion

The availability of federal funding for foster care and the adoption of mandatory reporting laws are commonly cited as reasons for the sharp increase in the foster care population in the mid-1970s. The number of children in substitute care had averaged about 300,000 between 1962 and 1972. By 1977, it had spiked to 502,000. (Carlson, 2008)

As the number of children removed from their homes rose, local agencies were hard-pressed to keep up. Concerns intensified that children were being taken away from their houses unnecessarily, only to languish, often in a series of foster homes, with little effort made either to reunite them with their birth families or to place them for adoption. Advocates of “permanency planning” argued that foster care should be short-term and that healthy child development required a permanent home, with the child's own family, if possible, or with an adoptive family. (Knowlton, 2001)

Experts say that the fights against the child-centered ideology that has driven child placement since Charles Loring Brace's time. As a result, the family conservation programs that have been realized in several states since then have often been criticized for keeping children with 'unfit' parents. The 1980 act also sought to regularize state programs, requiring states to submit plans to the federal government assuring that their child-welfare and foster care programs contained certain protections for children, including requirements for specific-case plans, periodic case reviews at least every six months and a dispositional hearing within 18 months.

There is unanimous agreement that promoting permanency for children caught in the foster care system, and increasing the number of parentless children adopted, are laudable goals. But most would also agree that meeting them depends, to a large extent, on dealing with a congregation of troubles from the lack of community-based ...