Nearly 400,000 children and teens are in foster care throughout the country. It might seem like an issue for others to tackle, but it hits closer to home than we realize.
One child enters foster care every two minutes. This could be your child’s classmate at school. A colleague’s niece. The grandson of a congregant at your place of worship. With an endless count of children entering the system daily, the need for resources and education are at an all-time high.
May is National Foster Care Month, and this year’s theme is “Engaging Youth. Building Supports. Strengthening Opportunities.” This message has been designed by the Children’s Bureau to recognize the important role that people play in assisting foster care children, youth and families, and to reinforce how essential it is to empower all young people with lasting relationships, meaningful support, and greater opportunities.
The Importance of Relationships
Relationships are key to every child’s lifelong fulfillment and success. And yet, every year, approximately 20,000 youth are emancipated from foster care without a permanent family or community. What they do have is a risk for detrimental outcomes later in life that is beyond high and entirely unnecessary.
These children often don’t even end up receiving the federally funded services carved out for them, simply because they don’t have trusted adults in their lives to advocate for them. In fact, nearly 80% of eligible teenagers leave foster care without receiving the services necessary to prepare them for adulthood.
Florida ranks third in the country (following California and Texas) with one of the highest rates of children in foster care (20,000+ kids). Thankfully, South Florida has some of the lowest numbers in the State, but far too many still require assistance.
Beyond becoming foster care parents, here’s how we can make a difference this month and throughout the year:
Become Informed. Check out Reflections: Stories From Foster Care for first-person stories from youth, parents, foster parents, and caseworkers to learn how you can help.
Raise Awareness. Find awesome free resources from the Child Welfare Information Gateway. Make your own PSA this month by adding images to your social media to generate an understanding of the foster care system.
Support the Cause. With so many children in need, we are blessed to also have many champions. Do some research and find an organization that speaks to you. Here are two of my family’s favorites:
- Connect Our Kids provides technology to help professionals find loving extended family members for children in foster care, as studies show that placing a child with relatives can reduce the trauma of being removed from home. Though every child has an extended family or network of neighbors and teachers, discovering them can be a slow process. Thanks to Connect Our Kids’ cutting-edge technology, life-changing connections for thousands of children–and society–are now being made for the long term.
- Comfort Cases aims to give children entering foster care some of the comfort and dignity that are stripped away when they are removed from their homes with little more than the clothes on their backs. A comfort case is a backpack of belongings that foster children can call their very own. Here’s how Comfort Cases describes it: “Every child deserves to have a cozy new pair of pajamas, a brand new warm blanket, and a new stuffed animal to hug during the traumatic transition into foster care.”
As moms, some of the best parenting we can do is to teach our children how we take care of our greater community. Especially the angels that are foster care children and families. National Foster Care Month invites us to do exactly that.
We do not need to know the beginning of a child’s story
to change the ending.
—Fi Newood
