Foster Care Fosters Homelessness

Life can be hard for children in foster care. There's the question of an unpleasant and unwanted split from the biological parents, the potential shuffling from foster home to foster home, and eventually, according to a comprehensive new report, the very real possibility of homelessness when youths "age out" of the foster care system at age 18. Unfortunately, it looks like adulthood can be even harder than childhood for the 30,000 youths who turn 18 each year and leave the foster care system.

Forty percent of them will be homeless, including couch surfing, at some point before age 24. (The study is over, but I'd be interested to know how many experience homelessness later in life.) Diane Zambito, who runs Connected by 25, a Tampa nonprofit that provides mentors and transitional services to those who age out of foster care, told NPR that she remembers when things were even worse. Ten years ago, she said, many foster care teens put their belongings in a plastic bag and got a ride to the nearest homeless shelter. Happy birthday!

Even today's youth who manage to avoid homelessness don't fare well. By their mid-20s, just half the foster care vets had jobs and six percent had college degrees. In contrast, a majority of the young men had been convicted of a crime and a majority of the young women were on public assistance.

"We took them away from their parents on the assumption that we as a society would do a better job of raising them," University of Washington and Partners for Our Children researcher Mark Courtney told the New York Times. "We've invested a lot money and time in their care, and by many measures they're still doing very poorly."

Courtney and fellow researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Chicago'sChapin Hall Center for Children looked at more than 600 foster care youths in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin, the majority of whom had entered foster care in their early teens. While younger children are often adopted, teens rarely are.

There are potential solutions — use matching funds from the federal government to allow young people to remain in foster care until age 21, as Illinois, New York, Vermont and Washington, D.C. do, and provide more transitional support — but during the recession, stopping the cycle of foster care to homelessness and poverty is not, disturbingly, a priority for cash-strapped states.