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The Importance Of Foster Care

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Foster care is a temporary arrangement in which adults provide for the care of a child or children whose birth parent is unable to care for them. Today, there are almost 428,000 children in foster care. Foster care is not a way for someone to make a little extra cash or have a kid keep you some company and if the child acts out you just get to harm them. Foster children are not toys or less of a human in any way but the sad part is, they have become looked at that way. They are uprooted from all that they had known and have a hard time adjusting to a new, strange environment.
A survey from 2011 states that thirteen percent of foster children run away at least once in their time in the system and another nine percent abandon their foster homes …show more content…
They are paid $525 for children ages five to twelve, and $666 for children ages thirteen and up. In 2014, 326 children died in foster care due to abuse and neglect. Foster care was created to give children a temporary home that is loving, nurturing, safe, and stable home to live in before they are adopted, and it has become an unsafe and threatening place for children. One in four children in foster care suffers post- traumatic stress disorder. They are scared to death to speak out if they are maltreated because they think maybe their next home will be worse. These statistics may seem scary but they get worse. Males in foster care are four times more likely to commit a crime, and females are ten times more likely. Previous foster youth are seven times more likely to become dependent on drugs and two times more likely to become dependent on alcohol. They get caught up with the wrong crowds of people because some foster parents do not love and support them and guide them in the right direction. Twenty- Five percent of former foster youth experience homelessness within four years of leaving the system. They go from being caught in broken homes, to having no home at all. Only forty- eight percent of male former foster youth are …show more content…
A solution of foster care reformation is to first help to prevent it. We need to help improve the impoverished communities that a great majority of the children come from. Most children are placed in foster care due to their birth parents not having the ability to pay for the necessary resources to raise their child. We need to focus on reforming impoverished areas by cleaning up the streets, decreasing crime and gang activity, create more jobs and businesses in these areas and decrease the number of homeless people. The rise of crack cocaine in the 90s directly created an increase of children in foster care. This statistical data shows that when there is an economic recession (like in the 90s) numbers of children in foster care increase. We can also help these communities by providing birth control to women who can not afford it. We need to open women's free clinics in impoverished areas where we can provide birth control, prenatal vitamins/medicine and check- ups for these

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