Social Issues In Foster Care

I chose this topic for a personal reason. One personal reason is because I was an eight-month-old baby when I was first placed in foster care. I was taken away from my biological mother when she decided to take me to the hospital. Once there the hospital staff diagnosed me with a severe bronchial infection on top of a severe skull fracture. When asked my biological mother couldn’t explain what happened and had multiple men that were not my biological father trying to give a reason for what had happened. After I was placed in foster care I was there until I turned two years old and was then adopted. I don’t remember a lot of it, but I do know from what my adopted parents told me that I was kind of a handful. When my adopted parents brought

According to the National Foster Parent Association to the 1500s, when the law allowed poor children to be placed into indentured facilities until they came of age. It was the poor English Law that lead to the development and regulation of family foster care. Indentured facilities allowed abuse and mistreatment, even though it was a step forward from almshouses (charitable homes that were built for poor people to live in) where children didn’t learn a trade and were open to terrible surroundings. This was a time it where children were placed in foster homes because their parents were deceased not because they were abused since it was socially accepted. Charles Loring Brace a minister and a director of the New York Children’s Aid Society began the free foster care movement in 1853 because he was troubled by many children sleeping in the streets. He created a plan to give the children homes by advertising for families that would be willing to give a home for these children. The New York Children's Aid Society's social agencies and state governments became involved in foster home placements. A few states led the movement, and began to pay for the room and food to the families who took care of children too young to be

In the beginning of the 1900s, social agencies started to supervise foster parents. This was the beginning where children’s needs as individuals were considered when placements were made. Foster care is a system of institutions, group homes, and private homes for abandoned, maltreated, and orphaned children. Placement in foster care is a solution to the care problems of children whose parents are unwilling, unable, or judged by the legal system as unfit to care for them. Foster care is unfavorable to American society, because “according to national statistic 40 to 50 percent of those children will never complete high school. Sixty-six percent of them will be homeless, go to jail or die within one year of leaving the foster care system at 18.” “80 percent of the prison population once was in foster care, and that girls in foster care are 600 percent more likely than the general population to become pregnant before the age of 21.” BRITTANY NUNN (2012), author of Statistics Suggest Bleak Futures for Children Who Grow up in the Foster Care