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The History of Foster Care in the US and its Negative Effects on Children

Overview

There are a troubling number of children placed in foster homes throughout the United States. These children are often referred to as subject children. Subject children include children who are orphaned, abandoned, or otherwise separated from their legal guardian. This system of placing these subject children into providing homes is referred to as foster care. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that there are over 400,000 children in the foster care system.

The United Sates adapted its ideas on foster care from English Poor Laws. These laws became the foundation of foster care. They determined that the state is responsible for all subject children. During most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thousands of subject children could be bought and sold for services. Children were shipped from England to colonial America to become indentured servants. Unfortunately, conditions on these ships were not ideal. Many children died of disease due to the unsanitary and overcrowded conditions on the ships. Once arriving to colonial America, however, these children will receive free food and board by providing labor services. Sometimes, the people from these homes will teach a skill or trade to the subject child. This will help the child succeed once his services to this home ended.

Just before the mid-eighteenth century, people began arguing against this indentured servant system. This upcoming movement advocated that subject children should be housed together through private orphanages. These orphanages will be funded mostly by charity. The government supported this method because it was cheap and favored younger, white subject children and commonly neglected older and minority children.In 1873, the first private orphan asylum was opened in Georgia. It was not until 1890, however, that the first public orphan asylum emerged in South Carolina with 115 orphans.

1800s

In 1838, Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Ex Parte Crouse. This stated that the government should make stronger attempts to ensure that children are receiving appropriate protection, care, and education. With this ruling, the state has the right and obligation to remove any child from a poorly supervised household. It also ruled that the state has to care for children who are not capable of taking care of themselves. This laid the ground work for the progression of institutional custody.

In the 1850s, orphanages became increasingly crowded therefore causing subject children to live in the streets of eastern cities. In response to this, in 1853, Charles Loring Brace established the New York Children's Aid Society (NYCAS). NYCAS became the basis for the idea of moving subject children from congregate institutions and into private homes. Charles Loring Brace created a system to transport subject children from overpopulated eastern cities to the west by train. The train regarding this system is referred to as an Orphan Train. Subject children are transported to the west without any cost in exchange for work around the house and farm. The Orphan Train movement lasted from 1853 to the 1990s placing more than 120,000 subject children from the streets to private, familial, homes.

1900s to Present Day

In 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt held a national conference that was the first conference to discuss the care of foster children.

In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sponsored the Economic Security Bill. This bill was then signed into law in 1935 as the Social Security Act. Title IV created a program called the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program. In 1962, this was renamed to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). This provided financial aid to children belonging to families with little to no income.

By the 1970s, orphanages started integrating minority subject children into their system. At first, minority children were placed with non-minority families. Over the next twenty years, it was protocol for minority children to reside with same-minority families.

In 1974, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 was passed.

In the 1980s, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act passed into law. This initiated the adoption movement as being a better alternative to foster care. This gave responsibility to individual states rather than the government.

In 1996, President William Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act into law. The new act requires states to provide health insurance coverage for more children with special needs who are receiving state subsidies. Any child who was receiving a federal adoption subsidy on or after October 1, 1997, shall continue to remain eligible for the subsidy if the adoption is disrupted or if the adoptive parents die. With this act, states are now required to make reasonable efforts and document efforts to place a child for adoption. The law also clarifies that reasonable efforts to reunify a child with his or her family and reasonable efforts to secure an adoptive family for a child, if needed, can go on at the same time.

November 18, 1999, The Foster Care Independence Act was passed. This helps foster youth who are aging out of care to become independent. Medicaid coverage and funds for room and board for youth age 18 to 21 who have aged out of foster care. It also increased funding for adoption incentive payments. The U.S. government funded the Education and Training Voucher Program to help youth obtain college or vocational training at a free or reduced cost. This money is administered by each state as they see fit.

The Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008 extends many benefits and funding for foster children between the age of 18 and 21. It provides financial incentives for guardianship and adoption. This is the most recent major federal legislation addressing the foster care system.

Psychological Impact of Foster Care

Children enter foster care because their families are having severe difficulties taking care of them. These difficulties can range from parental abuse, neglect or abandonment to physical or mental illness, addiction, incarceration or even death. The U.S. foster care system was designed to temporarily protect children whose parents are unable or unwilling to care for them. This is supposed to be until those parents are in a position to provide a safe, loving home for their children. However, many children stay in the system for years, moving from foster home to group home and one school district to another. This means many foster children aren't able to have a stable emotional, social, and educational foundation. Adjusting to a new family, home, environment, and school, is extremely stressful to a child. Recent findings from the science of brain development show that such prolonged stress biologically alters the structure of the growing brain and can impede the appropriate connection of brain circuits, disrupt cognitive development, and affect the immune system.

Foster care is supposed to have the best interest of the child in mind. However, living within the foster care system can be traumatic, both emotionally and mentally. Within three months of placement, many children display signs of depression, aggression, or withdrawal.Products of foster care have long and short-term detrimental effects. Research estimates that up to 80 percent of foster children have emotional and/ or behavioral problems.These problems may come from their experiences before entering the system or they can be a result of the foster care experience itself. For many children, the foster care experience can bring on a feeling of grief. This comes from the feeling of losing a natural parent, not knowing if and when they will ever be reunited.

Through the years, it has been founded that foster care can be deeply damaging to a child’s mental health. Children in the foster care system have more compromised developmental outcomes than children who do not experience placement in foster care. The emotional consequences that stem from the foster care experience can be low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, suicidal tendencies, post-traumatic stress disorder, trust issues, and attachment disorder. Children placed in foster care, are more likely to develop and suffer from emotional, behavioral, and educational problems than children who are raised by abusive and high-risk parents. Abuse, neglect, and traumatic experiences have long-term effects that often impact children well into adulthood.

Children who were abused by their natural parents have even more of a negative impact. Abuse can affect the way the brain develops and cause learning disabilities. Being neglected, and a lack of bonding as an infant or child can cause emotional and psychological trauma that is very difficult to overcome.

The issues stemming from foster care can linger on well into adulthood. Many products of foster care need therapy later in life as a result of the foster care experience.

Foster Care and Education

The system makes it hard to properly educate foster children. While there are laws to help the state and schools work together, it is hard when these children are often being shifted. Their home and school lives are inconsistent. The impact of this makes learning more challenging for them than for other kids.

The estimated number of children with emotional or behavioral disorders in schools, is 35 to 60 percent higher than that of the general student population. In school, foster children are labeled with negative terms such as neglected throwaways. They are often viewed as troubling youth by teachers, principals, and even their caretakers. More than 60 percent of youth in foster care drop out of school, which is twice as high as the dropout rates for all children. According to the most recent research, only somewhere between three and ten percent of foster youth graduate from college.

Counseling and Treatment for Foster Children

There's a need for mental health care for adolescents who have been in foster care. They are five times more likely to need mental health care than adolescents who aren't in foster care. The stress that foster children endure is more than any child should have to handle. Anyone going through their experiences would need counseling. Too often, foster children are just not receiving any counseling or therapy.

There are intense home and community-based services available for those with difficult mental health conditions. Foster children often move to institutional settings when they can't manage their behavior in the community. Such institutions and group homes are meant to correct poor behavior patterns. However, these settings don't always benefit the children. Instead their behaviors can worsen due to closeness with deviant peers, and further loss of family contact.

Foster children would benefit greatly from regular mental health treatment early on. This will help them deal with their stress effectively. If treatment can be offered quickly, the long term effects may be reduced. More laws need to be created to ensure therapy takes place within the foster care system.