Foster Children and the Struggles Faced Within LIFE IN FOSTER CARE 10/16/2012 When the economy is low, the foster care system sees a rise in abandoned, neglected, and abused children adding more than the normal amount of cases. “In 2011 there were 401,100 children in foster care” (Child Trends, 2012). These children depend upon the people that work within the system to help and provide them with guidance and security. Foster children usually receive their basic needs while in the system, but older children tend to experience more difficulties than younger children do in foster care. He or she is likely to end up in trouble with the law than their peers without the proper support (Cowan, 2004, p. 1008).
The Developmental Issues on Children in the Foster Care System The foster care system is the system where children go when their parents are unable to take care of them. In the foster care system, children are placed by trained professionals who are licensed adults that provide substitute parental care when the parents are away. Research states that the number of children in the foster care system was 513,000, a decline of about 10% from 2000 (Bigner, 2011). Children that are placed in foster care have suspiciously high rates of physical, developmental, and mental health problems and often have many unmet medical and mental health care needs. A greater number of young children with complicated, serious physical health, mental health, or developmental problems are entering foster care during the early years when brain growth is most active.
It states that in the UK at least 200,000 children live in household where there is a known high risk case of domestic abuse and violence, with very many more affected at some point. Approximately 450.000 parents are estimated to have mental health problems and an estimated 2500.00 children have parents who are problematic drug
Abuse and neglect in the home is a leading cause of death for children age 4 and younger. Most physical abuse fatalities are committed by fathers and other male caretakers, although the great majority of parenting and child abuse prevention programs are targeted to women. Family violence is strongly correlated with child abuse fatalities; about 50 percent of homes with adult violence also involve child abuse and neglect. The pathology spills over class and economic condition. The cycle of abuse is difficult to interrupt; abused children often, as adults, become abusers themselves.
The parents that gave birth to me were both broken, possibly from varying degrees of child abuse or neglect by their parents, or because of their inappropriate choices over their lifetime. Regardless, today I can put their lives in perspective and attempt to learn and grow. First, in order to understand who I am, there needs to be an understanding of my parents. In brief, my mother, Hally, was placed in 14 different foster homes within a 15 year span. She had two siblings she never met.
System Theory Anna Meece Eastern Kentucky University Introduction My At-Risk population is the children in foster care but not only are they in foster care these are the children that nobody wants. The boys and girls are older ages are harder to adopt because not many people want to take them. The only reason they get out of the system is by aging out of on rare occasions of going home, but that’s doesn’t happen often .They are an At-Risk population because there are so many of them right not in the system that it is getting to be an epidemic. Too many are going in and not enough are coming out. Sure they get placed in a very loving foster home but that foster home is not a pre adaptive one so they don’t get to know what a forever family
There was one thing that set them apart from their peers, they both desperately wanted children, but due to medical complications they could not reproduce themselves. After many months of consideration, they finally decided to adopt a child. The entire adoption process took about seven months. During that time the Dillard’s were preparing themselves for their first child. They did everything from reading parenting books to buying toys for their new son.
In a slight way with Jack as he makes sure she doesn’t have to go to juvie, but it’s truly shown on pages 258-259 when Vivian pays it forward to Molly and saves her. In this portion of the book Molly has been kicked out of the foster home she was in for the duration of the book. She doesn’t really have anywhere to go and if she went back into the system she would have to move and leave her life behind. Her boyfriend, her last year of high school in a familiar place, and many other things forcing her to start over, a difficult thing to do, especially at her age. Thankfully though Vivian comes through and gives Molly a room in her house.
I recently had a miscommunication encounter with my only sister, feeling as though she felt where I was coming from about the entire situation. The incident began when I told her how to raise her kids. I know how it feels to be a single parent as my mother was the same way raising us but, my uncles were there to play a father figure in our life and taught us what our mother could not. That is all that I wanted to do because, of the fact that no matter what the parents go through the kid(s) should never have suffer. There are certain things in this life that a mother cannot teach her son and as that a
If they were to deny the offer, I was to become a ward of the state, which means I would travel from foster home to foster home until or if a family adopted me. My aunt and uncle had already established a family of their own and both of their children were getting ready to attend college that fall. Fortunately, after a long and arduous process, my aunt and uncle decided to become my legal guardians and eventually adopted me. My early abandonment by my birth mother and birth father has impacted my entire life, and has purely made me the person I am today. Because of the love of my adopted family, I am able to focus on the positive in life rather than the negative.