Pros And Cons Of The Foster Care System

Introduction

Imagine growing up with the fear of constantly being abused by your parents, or not knowing the next time that your caretakers would feed you. Believe it or not, that is the reality for many children living in the United States, which is why the foster care system was established. The foster care system was created to find homes for children who are unable to live with their biological parents, for reasons such as death, abuse, or an unhealthy home environment. Today, there are around 500,000 children residing in the system, and this figure is growing daily (American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 2013). There has been some controversy about how the government handles the foster care system, as some believe that there

According to Kelly Crane, a child policy specialist for the National Conference of State Legislatures, about $25 billion are spent on the foster care system by all levels of the government in 2006, and a big portion of these funds are used to supply foster parents with money in return for fostering children (Crane 2011). Due to the fact that the government gives money to those willing to participate in foster care, many couples that would normally ignore the foster care system are now more than willing to take children into their homes, and thus, there is a greater amount of available parents. This allows more children to find a home, which is entirely a result of the government

According to Connie Marshner, who is the Vice-President for Development of the American Family Business Institute, while there were over 225,000 parents that had taken steps to adopt in 2006, only a small percentage had been able to take in a child, because the regulations and long processes involved kept them from doing so (Marshner 2006). This issue has an enormous effect on the foster care system, because the strict requirements for parents make it extremely difficult for children to leave the foster care system, and, thus, many foster children have to live in crowded foster homes instead of a permanent living situation. Marshner’s ideas are similar to Conna Craig’s, in the sense that the government’s actions, whether they are structuring funds or creating regulations, have a substantial effect on the number of foster children in the system. Nevertheless, there are still more unique ways that the federal government has a role in regulating the