Do you think there should be a reconsideration about the foster care system in the Untied States?

During the years following World War II, the U.S. began closing orphanages – large residential institutions – and transitioning to group homes and foster care. Traditional orphanages are no longer a part of the child care system. It was considered to be a triumph, and a big step forward in social justice, when the final orphanages closed.

Was this really a good reform? I honestly don’t know. On the one hand, institutionalized people are often incapable of becoming independent, functioning members of society. On the other hand, orphanages provided care, housing, and education very efficiently, and they weren’t all run and staffed by child-hating monsters. I’ve known many older people who grew up in orphanages and said that they’d always been treated kindly and kept safe.

Foster homes are frightening by definition – tossing helpless children into unknown situations, with occasional visits by social workers. Certainly, there are plenty of foster parents who love children, want to care for them, and give them paths to good lives. Also, fostering to adopt is a wonderful thing. Yet, I’d be horrified if a child I care about were to enter the foster system, which seems too much like a game of roulette.

After having dealt with it firsthand (my sister adopted my best friend’s sister’s daughter), there are many things about it that need a drastic change. I helped foster the child for years before my sister decided to adopt. It’s a unique situation dice, before we fostered her, we already knew her. She came out of a horrible situation, but being put in the system, before it was even an option for us to foster, made things even worse. She was put with a woman who was horrible and extremely mean. She stole what toys my niece had and gave them all to her biological children, let her watch very inappropriate things, cussed at her, yelled at her, etc.

Not to mention all of the seriously whacky, screwed up rules the state has that make everything worse. My niece came out of her sexual abuse therapy thinking that it was bad to see men with their shirts off, if they were walking around outside on a hot summer day. There was a lot we had to undo just to teach her healthy ways to think.

This answer is fairly vague, but I could write a novel about how difficult and horrible it is to work with the state. They mess up in unforgivable ways. They’re supposed to be helping and protecting children, but they fail way too often.

That just points out yet another facet of this flawed system. It seems totally logical from an emotional stance. The emotion was to not have Dicken-style orphanages and put the little nippers into loving homes and family situations (which then were more like the Brady’s). It hasn’t kept up with the times and grew too large for proper oversight. As long as no sexual misconduct goes on the system seems content not to care or look too much. If the kid keeps going to the ER with broken bones and black eyes someone might take notice. If the foster parents are spending most of the money on themselves, if the kid told the worker who once through may not be back for another 6 months, would not catch it once the worker goes away? Who is the kid gonna tell then? Because of the lack of oversight because the system has grown too large lets people in whose only motivation is to put up with the kid for free housekeeping and a government check, but no one is supposed to even think of that.

Case in point, in my state.

Foster care goes way back , and has seen many changes down through the ages.
The current system was devised to be more humane than the group homes and orphanages which were under funded, dreary, and seldom cared for or about by citizens. Given current programs in place, such as: The Big Brother, Big Sister programs, children’s charities ranging in healthcare, Make A Wish, police and other groups involved in overseeing or assisting poor, and or homeless children, I should think that those establishments would fare much better these days, and be just as nurturing as the best foster homes.
American communities don’t turn their backs on children in need as they used to. The foster care system as it stands now, however, simply provides a complicated hiding system which allows for atrocities to go on unnoticed.
I believe the current system stinks, and should be overhauled in a major way. It is costly, under protective, outdated, mismanaged.
Problem one; finding someone willing to undertake the task of completely overhauling the system to eliminate what now stands, and provide a better way.