An Overview of the Origin and Description of Foster Care

Can you imagine being born already in the foster care system? Then being adopted and after that going back into foster care? Some can’t even fathom going threw it but I did. As soon as I was born I was a ward of the court and after that I was adopted by my auntie. Ten years later my adopted mom died of many cancers. Leaving me and my two cousins to wonder what was going to be next for us. As my cousins went back to their mother I was thrown back in to foster care. I became a ward of the court once again until they read my mother’s will that stated her god daughter was to become my guardian for the next eight years. Being a part of the foster care culture is like an animal waiting for the right home. Being in foster care you jump from home to home, family to family waiting till the right one comes along. A lot of foster and former foster children suffer social and psychological problems. The statistics of children in foster care are very shocking as well as how long some of them stay there and the age they start out in the foster care.

Foster care was first started in 1562 it allowed children from poor family to be placed with rich families as indentured servants until they became of age. Then they were allowed to go and live with their families. If you were an orphan you were put into an Amish home, but the orphan didn’t learn any trade which was very necessary in those years to survive. In the beginning of the 1900’s the government started to get involved. They started to make families have a license if they wanted to have a child that was not theirs in their home. Also, the government had routine checkups with the family to make sure they were doing okay. This is where social workers came in. This was all do to a man name Charles Loring who was tired of seeing children on the streets of New York hungry with no place to sleep but the streets. A lot of children are removed from their homes due to neglect, mental, physical, and sexual abuse. More than half of the children that are taken away are returned to their families but, the family must get help before the child can be returned to their home. There are more white (non-Latino) children in foster care than any other race. They hold the highest percent of sixty-one. As of the other races that end up into foster care their percent are, seventeen percent Hispanic, fifteen percent black, four percent two or more races, three percent asian pacific islander and, American Indian at one percent. Most children that end up in foster care are taken away from their homes at very young age. The youngest age that they come is at new born but the ages doesn’t stop there they come from new born to seventeen. There are also more boys in foster care then there are girls. The percent of boys that are in foster care are fifty-two and girls at forty-eight percent. The time that most children stay in foster care is about a month till their parents get the help they need but most children stay in foster care their whole like till they age out of the system and have to find for his or hers self.

A lot of children come in to foster care with social problems and a lot of them leave with social problems as while

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