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Former foster children are joining together to push for reform. Advocate William Ritchotte explains what's needed and how to get it done.

Continue reading Inside Out: Foster Care Reform - Documented Abuses

I really appreciate this perspective on foster care, particularly because it comes from someone that has lived through a very challenging experience, and clearly also done his research to determine some of the "facts" to go along with the emotional component that he experienced first-hand. While I have certainly known and seen many wonderful, happy foster care stories, there are so many more unhappy ones -- so many that I almost cynically think of a child being placed in foster care as being a nearly guaranteed death sentence for his/her spirit. While I think it's impossible to take away all the emotional trauma that occurs when children bounce around in foster care, it is certainly possible to take away the threat of physical violence and increase the security (at least when it comes to a child being guaranteed a home that is absolutely 100 percent guaranteed to be without violence) of the child's life. Even in transition, a child is absolutely entitled to nurturing and loving people to guide him/her through the challenges of life.

If creating this safety means more man hours spent on investigating prospective foster homes and more regular check-ups, I think that should be the goal.

I had the honor of working in a family preservation program for 6 months (before changes in the way that work was funded shut the program down). Our whole premise was that if you can build on a family's strengths and keep children safe with their own families, they will almost always be better off than they are in foster care. While we were unable to prevent all children from being taken into (state) custody, due to their parents' and sometimes their own choices, we were able to help a lot of families stay together and improve their day-to-day functioning. Yet for some reason, efforts to improve life for children rarely come while they're still young and with their families. That's especially sad, since when they're older it becomes so much harder to place them elsewhere.

It is a very sad commentary on the country in general that children are abused by the very people that are supposed to be taking care of them because of abuse by their parents. There needs to be reform in foster care, but it needs to be completed carefully and thoughtfully. There are families that are doing foster care just to make some money because they are too lazy to work, but there are also loving families that take children into their home because they want to help. There needs to be some sort of system set up to make sure that abuse becomes a rare occurence instead of a regular occurence. Otherwise, we are setting these children up for some major problems down the road.

Even among people who undertake foster care to "make money" as you say, I believe there are people whose intentions are good. If we believe that people should do what they're passionate about to earn a living, we should not judge people for that if their passion is caring for kids.

I think the problem comes because many people are in over their heads. They don't have the skills (and often don't even realize they don't have them) to deal with grieving children, and yet they don't feel they can say, "I'm in over my head." Some people take on too many children because they feel sorry for them, which spikes the stress level in the home.

If foster parenting really paid what it was worth, you'd have a larger pool of applicants to do it. You could insist on intense training, with people earning genuine certification after internships, etc. That's the degree of reform that would have to happen to really make a difference in the quality of foster care.

Of course there are people who go into it with good intentions. And of course people get overwhelmed and don't know how to tell the caseworkers. Even parents with natural children get overwhelmed! The thing to remember is that these children deserve a loving home where they feel safe and secure. Foster care needs to pay more so that they can be more discriminating in choosing who they allow to be foster parents. There should be more training and help for these people who take children into their homes. Caseworkers should not have as many cases as they have. The whole system needs to be reformed, but will it be? Probably not!