Aging Out
What it Means to Age Out of Foster Care
The transition event, for a youth who has never found placement, is called “aging out.” This moment can be adaptive and hold promise, or fulfill a cycle of abandonment. A youth may at last learn to build relationships or forever place them wistfully at arm’s length. Self-sufficiency either becomes a liberating skill, or the lack of it becomes lifelong self-recrimination. Mostly, it’s a time of peril. Financial aid halts: you are on your own. Find a job. Buy food. Find shelter and transportation. Pretend that you are not scared.
Aging Out Statistics
From the National Foster Youth Institute, NFYI.org and FosterClub.com:
20% of the young women become pregnant by 21
20% of youth who age out become homeless in two to four years
25% experience post-tramautic stress disorder (compared to 4% of the general population)
47% are unemployed
50% have serious drug or alcohol problems
60% of the young males receive convictions and migrate into the criminal justice system
“Transitioning out of foster care is a hugely emotionally and psychologically overwhelming thing... on one hand they really want to be on their own, and on the other hand, they’re terrified.”
When Your Birthday is a Cliff
When I revisit the writing of Another Place Called Home, I am jolted by the absolute fear that I and the other girls had of failing. We didn’t know what success looked like, but we surely knew failure from our earliest days on earth. The fear of what we faced when our time at the Home ended never left us.
In the book you’ll meet housemothers who told us daily that we had no value. Many girls came to believe that they would fail in school, and would end up jobless and pregnant. Although the term “aging out” wasn’t used, we knew our eighteenth birthday was a calamity, not a celebration.
— Susan DuMond, author of Another Place Called Home