National Foster Care Month 2022
Foster Care Month May 2022: A Turn Toward Kinship as a Solution
“Relative and Kin Connections: Keeping Families Strong” is this year’s National Foster Care Month theme. It represents a significant new goal and emphasis for the youth foster care community.
Over the years, there’s been a great deal of criticism and concern about the foster care system. Wrong focus, taking kids away from their homes rather than fixing their homes, abuse of children, relying on group homes, heavy bureaucracy interested in protecting itself. Let’s take a look at a few of the issues.
First, here’s a criticism offered by a social services director.
In 2014, Molly McGrath Tierney, then Director of the Baltimore City Department of Social Services, gave a Tedx talk that gives foster care a definite black eye. A video of her talk appears on the NCCPR.org website. Here, she admonishes us to work on the families to save the children. Do not pull the children away into an unknown world. And in 2018, the Family First law was passed.
And now, an observation of a former foster youth.
A recent New York Times guest opinion by Sixto Cancel, a foster care alum, points to the misuse of group homes for foster children. “Group homes are being used not as temporary shelters but as long-term placements for foster youths.”
And a question that continues to haunt us: Why are so many children in foster care?
According to Foster-America.org,the problem is neglect. “The vast majority of children in foster care are there not because of the physical or sexual abuse situations that make headlines, but because they experienced neglect.” The most recent AFCARS statistics say that today almost 140,000 children (64%) are in foster care due to neglect. Can a revised focus on foster care that emphasizes families, and now kinship placements, make a dent in that staggering number?
It would appear that we don’t yet know - as a society, as a caring nation, as a financial supporter of foster care - how to do it, and do it right.
Are there foster care success stories? Yes.
Take a look at Foster-America.org. You’ll find stories, plans, and projects that illustrate how foster care can, and does, succeed. Here’s an example. A foster care alum is working together with community partners to engage previously homeless young adults in a project to “create policy recommendations to prevent housing instability.”
Sixto Cancel, Founder and CEO of thinkof-us.org, author of the New York Times article cited earlier, tells us “this is how we find out, by talking to real human beings.”
Kinship care, we trust, is part of the solution. Remaining a member of your own family, staying with relatives you’ve known, living with people who know your parents and understand the problems you face, provides a context that is difficult for foster parents to provide. Sixto says that we need “…a system that supports grandma, uncle, cousins, people that the children already know and they're already related to, and figure out: How do we support them in taking them in?”
National Foster Care Month 2022 elevates kinship to a high level of visibility. It’s time we take a good hard look.