Stability for the Children Leaving the Foster Care System Essay

Twenty four thousand children each year age out of the foster care system (Fowler, Toro and Miles 1454). Of that number about half of them are African American, followed by Caucasian and then the other minorities. There are many problems facing these children that are placed in the foster care system. Of course the obvious is that they need a place to live while they are under the age of eighteen also that they need love and support from the people that are around them. Another little known problem is that these youths face once they leave the foster care system many find themselves without a permanent housing, housing that they can finally say that it is there’s and no one is going to take away from them. This paper will cover over why this is a problem for them and some ideas from which we can try to make some changes for the better. For years we have had a need to find housing for children that did not have any place to turn to. In recent years our country has taken up the slack for doing this very thing. In the past these children were seen after by mostly Catholic orphanages forced into hard labor and even had to beg for the money, also called alms, so that they could have necessities. These places were run by the priest and nuns that lived on the premises. Often these children had little food schooling or clothing to call their own. The orphanage that was in Galveston in the early 1900s was run by 3 nuns and 2 priest to the 90 children that were housed their. Obviously these children received very little quality time with any adult figure. Now a days it has gotten a little better, while they do not have many orphanages any more and they have been replaced with foster homes. Youths get more one on on... ...ouses than any other race in America. This has to have contributed to the high numbers of African Americans in the penal system. There absolutely need to be some more cultural sensitivity awareness training on the part of not only the Social Workers that make the determination to remove these children from their homes, but also on the part of the government that oversee these different agencies so that this overrepresentation of this certain population will be reduced. The steps needed are classes that will make these workers more aware of what to expect upon entering these homes and how the people that they encounter my be different and how to decipher with more accuracy if the children really are in life threatening danger. All of these this will contribute to the overall mental and physical well being of these children entering and exiting the foster care system.