Foster parents offer a home for a child to live in and parental care when the child has been removed from the birth home by the child welfare system. He lives with a foster family until the system finds him a permanent home. In 2006 there were 510,000 children in foster care. Before the foster care system, children lived in orphanages or were left in abusive and neglectful home situations.
No Safe Place to Call Home
Many children who have lost their parents have no relatives willing or able to take them in. Traditionally they went to orphanages. Few children in foster care are orphans. Most have been removed from their parents' homes because of neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse or because the parent is physically or intellectually incapable of tending to a child's needs.
The Rise of Foster Care
In the 1940s, sociologists came to believe that in orphanages the mother-infant bond is never established, leading to severe emotional problems for the children. They thought that if the children were put in a home-like setting, even if it was temporary, the child would do better. Ideally, the foster parents would come to love the child and adopt him. Unfortunately, because many foster children have been abused, they may prove too difficult to integrate into a normal family. They end up moving from foster home to foster home, compounding the emotional damage.
Types of Foster Care
About 25 percent of all foster children are with relatives. Many are in "transition centers" which are like short-term orphanages, or they are in long-term facilities because their problems are so severe they are unadoptable. The families of about half the children in foster care are working with social services to meet requirements to be reunited with their children. The remaining children in foster homes are to be adopted if a permanent home is found.
Benefits and Detriments for the Child
A child can benefit from living in a stable, caring foster home while he waits to return to his parents or be adopted. Living with a family is usually better for a child than living in an impersonal orphanage. There are three problems with the system, though. Some states highly regulate foster homes and find competent foster parents, but other states lack resources for intense monitoring and children may be abused in foster homes. Being moved from home to home can cause worse emotional damage than living in a well-run orphanage.
Benefits and Detriments for Foster Parents
Many foster parents thrive on providing a normal family life for children. They may come to love the children and adopt them. Sometimes, however, foster parents find they cannot cope with a disturbed child who has "attachment disorder" and is unable to bond, or who has "oppositional defiant disorder" and disrupts the household with angry or dangerous behavior.
