Twenty years ago, I entered the foster care system and stayed in a group home for ten years because my parents, who were heroin addicts, were unable to care for me. I felt institutionalized, alone, and longed for my own family.
The following questions were generated during a youth and young adult panel discussion and developed as a tool for workers to ask prospective parents and share with waiting teens.
We have to stop accepting that teenagers in particular are not worthy of permanency. We have to continue to recruit only unconditionally committed permanent families for every teen in our care who will be discharged to no one.
The Coalition's Executive Director proposes five ways that we can better support New York’s foster parents.
Informational & Practice Publications, Resources, & Tools from Collaborating Organizations
Across the country, child welfare systems suffer from a lack of suitable resource families due to inappropriate recruiting and inadequate support. Resource families play a critical support role in any child welfare system, although many agencies fail to give them the respect, support and attention they deserve.
A child can live in a foster home for years and never touch the issues deep down inside, as long as that child can hold on to the belief that some day he or she is going back to their birth family.
NYS regulations require that agencies have a comprehensive recruitment strategy/plan for establishing a pool of waiting foster and adoptive parents that reflects the racial and ethnic diversity of the children in foster care.
Prospective parents choose to foster because they find pleasure in parenting and they want to improve a child’s life. Appropriate training will help retain foster parents and enable them to do a better job for the children in their care.
Most people who want to foster or adopt children don’t begin with the skills essential to care for children who have been neglected and physically and sexually abused. These skills must be developed. And foster and adoptive parents aren’t clients who receive services but rather, resource families who need and deserve a comprehensive array of system supports.
