Life Changing Choices - Just in Time for Foster Youth

Life Changing Choices (eBook)

The 7 Essential Choices at the Heart of Transformational Change for Foster Youth and Your Community

Just in Time for Foster Youth (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
194 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-9435-5 (ISBN)

For 20 years, Just in Time for Foster Youth (JIT) has created a reliable, responsive and real Community for young people, ages 18-26, as they transition from the foster care system into adulthood. The majority of JIT staff have lived experience in foster care and hundreds of volunteers help connect over 2,000 youth to the critical resources and lasting relationships needed to become Confident, Capable and Connected, breaking the cycle of foster care. After all the resources and effort dedicated to improving child welfare systems, with little significant change in positive outcomes, we invite exploration of an alternative. A different approach to resources for children and families struggling to thrive that might ultimately replace what isn't working today. We wrote this book because we've continued to see a stubborn truth over the last two decades about the critical necessity of Community and Connection. A truth reinforced by history and our own experience about why systems will resist change and are unlikely to be empowering, healthy places for young people or families, despite our best intentions. This book is not a lecture but a challenge for all of us to consider a different point of view. A mindset and model that has empowered our efforts at Just in Time and might do the same for people in any community who are frustrated by the persistent trauma that seems built into the current experience of our children in care. And we believe that all the young people impacted by foster care are our children. We wrote this book so you can hear their voices, as we have. So that you can get to know their stories as we have. Once you do, we hope you seek out their stories in your community and ask others to join and listen. Most of all, we want this book to start your own crucial conversations about the old Assumptions and the Choices we can change, replacing historically negative outcomes with lasting positive Empowerment.

All the resources and effort dedicated to improving child welfare systems have made little change in positive outcomes. At Just In Time For Foster Youth, we invite exploration of an alternative approach to resources for children and families that lead to measurably improved results. We wrote this book because we've continued to see a stubborn truth over the last two decades about the critical necessity of Community and Connection as the key to that lasting impact. This truth has been reinforced by our own experiences and speaks to why systems resist change and fail to be empowering, healthy places for young people or families, despite the best intentions. This book is not a lecture, but a challenge for all of us to consider a different point of view. It presents a mindset and model that has empowered our efforts at Just in Time and might do the same for anyone who is frustrated by the persistent trauma that seems built into the current experience of our children in care. We wrote this book so you can hear their voices as we have, and get to know their stories as we do. Once their voices are clearly heard, we hope you seek out youth stories in your community and ask others to join and listen. Most of all, we want this book to start crucial conversations about the old Assumptions and Choices we can change to replace historically negative outcomes with lasting, positive Empowerment.

Let’s talk about The System.

So where do we start? At this moment, there are about 400,000 foster youth in the child welfare system nationwide and the number of children touched by foster care is increasing.

This, despite efforts to have fewer children removed from their parents and homes to enter foster care. There are signs that a host of factors – including economic insecurity, opioid addiction, mental health challenges, and the pandemic – are increasing the number of children and young adults impacted by foster care. (Scientific American)

Our Children. With a median age of 7 years. (AFCARS)

Imagine the huge impact a separation like this would have on any first grader you know, especially if they were not cared for in their new surroundings with an intentional investment in their long-term well-being.

And the numbers speak volumes on how The System underinvests in these children, committing less than 50% of what an average family spends to raise a child from birth to 17 years of age. (iFoster)

Without the necessary support, why would we expect young people in care to be empowered to thrive? And the story continues…

Roughly, 20,000 youth age out of the foster care system between the ages of 18 – 21 annually. Within four years of aging out, 50% will have no earnings and those who do will make an average annual income of $7,500 (NFYI – National Foster Youth Institute).

There’s less than a 3% chance for those who age out of foster care to earn a college degree at any point in their life. (NFYI)

Homelessness and unemployment become a huge issue. After reaching the age of 18, 20% of those in foster care will become instantly homeless (NFYI) and 29% report being homeless from age 19-21 (Annie E. Casey Foundation - AECF).

Just 57% of foster youth who age out of the system report being employed full- or part-time at age 21 (AECF).

Within two years of leaving care, 25% of males will be in prison, and 70% of females who age out of the foster care will become pregnant before the age of 21. (NFYI)

It’s a tragic loss. For the children, for our society, and for our future.

That’s where we are. Let’s explore how we got here.

Origins & Inevitable Failures of the Foster Care System

The Orphan Train Brought Us Here.

The first orphanage in the United States was reportedly established in Mississippi in 1729, but institutional orphanages were uncommon before the early 19th century. Back then, relatives or neighbors raised children who had lost their parents. Arrangements were informal and rarely involved courts.

Around 1830, the number of American homeless children in large Eastern cities exploded. By 1850, an estimated 10,000-30,000 homeless children were among the population of 500,000 living in New York City.

Some children were orphaned when their parents died in epidemics of typhoid, yellow fever or the flu. Others were abandoned due to poverty, illness, or addiction. For protection against street violence, they banded together and formed gangs.

This was in 1850.

By 1853, a New York minister became concerned with the plight of street children and founded the Children's Aid Society. Charles Loring Brace set out to offer religious, vocational, and academic instruction to children, establishing the nation's first runaway shelter to provide room, board, and basic education.

The Children’s Aid Society initially attempted to find homes and jobs for individual children in New York, but they were overwhelmed by the numbers needing help, so Brace came up with a plan. His idea was to send groups of children from the East Coast to more rural areas where they could be adopted by “morally upright” farm families and raised to have better lives.

Brace was also aware of the growing need for labor in the expanding farm country and expected farmers would welcome homeless children, take them in, and treat them as their own.

Placements depended on what was available, children were often treated like cattle “up for adoption,” siblings were separated, and there was very little oversight.

His program became known as the Department of Foster Care and the transportation of children from their home area via the railroad became known as the “orphan train.”

Less than half the children on the trains were actual orphans and as many as 25% had two living parents. They ended up on the trains or in orphanages either because their families didn’t have the means to raise them or because they had been abused and abandoned or were runaways. Sometimes older children on the train were simply in search of work or a free ticket out of the city.

Once they reached their destination, orphan train children had no choice in where they ended up. Prominent local citizens were responsible for working with the Children's Aid Society to ensure suitable placements and conditions.

Those placements depended on what was available, children were often treated like cattle “up for adoption,” and siblings were separated; there was very little oversight.

The “orphans” were perceived as free labor to help with chores around the farm, with the additional expectation that families would raise them alongside their own children while providing food, clothing, shelter, education, and $100 when they turned 21.

From 1855 to 1875, the Children's Aid Society sent an average of 3,000 children on trains to 45 states each year, as well as Canada and Mexico. Orphan train children encountered ridicule and prejudice and felt like outsiders in their host families. Often, their new communities viewed them as delinquent offspring of drunks and prostitutes. Many children were forced to change their names and lost their identities in the process.

By 1929, approximately 200,000 children had traveled west by rail and were “placed” in new homes. Brace's notion was that children were better off in placements with families, rather than in institutions.

This remains a basic tenet of present-day foster care over 150 years later.

Why does this matter?

The Orphan Train Legacy

When we begin to understand the origins of foster care, it becomes clear that the patterns of negative outcomes today are rooted in patterns, systems and mental models established a century and a half ago.

Let’s follow this 19th century orphan “train of thought” - or mental model - to our 21st century system (Fig. 1).

• There are “broken” children from “broken homes” whose parents cannot care for them due to poverty, illness, addiction, abuse, and neglect who should be removed for the good of everyone.

• They should be “placed” outside their communities with new, upright foster families, if possible, and provided with basic shelter and education.

• Some children may be put “up for adoption” and, in the process, siblings may be separated.

• Children face obstacles while in the system ranging from prejudice to feeling like outsiders in family placements.

• Many people will view them as damaged offspring of deficient addicts and lowlifes.

• Many children can be expected to lose their identity through repeated moves, bouncing from one foster care placement to another, never knowing when they will be uprooted.

• Some will be further abused in systems that are supposed to protect them.

• Instead of being safely reunified with their families, or moved quickly into adoptive homes, many children languish in foster care for years.

Brace’s pre-Civil War solution for moving children off city streets persists as the prevailing “mental model” for foster care today and was the same mentality that pulled apart Native American families with devastating results, sending them to “schools” to “fix” them.

The change is the number of children impacted. According to the Children’s Bureau and AFCARS Report, in FY 2021:

○ At the beginning of the year, almost 400,000 children were in foster care

○ An additional 207,000 children under 18 entered foster care, totaling 607,000, and 114,000 were waiting for adoption

○ Children ages 0 to 5 made up the largest share at 42%

Children in child welfare face profound mental health challenges and are disproportionately LGBTQ+ children of color. It’s estimated that up to 80% of children in foster care suffer from a mental health issue compared to 18-22% of the general population. (NCSL)

Numerous studies, including a report of foster care alumni by Casey Family Programs, show that those impacted by the current foster care system have a higher prevalence of physical and psychiatric morbidity. Foster care alumni are almost twice as likely to suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder than U.S. war veterans. (Northwest Foster Care Alumni...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	28.4.2023
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
ISBN-10	1-6678-9435-8 / 1667894358
ISBN-13	978-1-6678-9435-5 / 9781667894355

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