Connecting Prospective Foster Parents to Foster Care Professionals
The highlighted categories in the table above are racial demographics overrepresented in the foster kid population. This signals that there needs to be a change in how foster care is managed.
Fortunately, the Social Work community and all US States (that we have spoken to) generally agree on solution steps like reducing child poverty, emphasizing kinship care, relating to culture, and diligent foster parent recruiting can help meet the challenge.
As we celebrate 2023 May National Foster Care month, here is the latest publicly available data. In 2021, an estimated 391,098 children were in foster care in the United States. This number has been steadily declining in recent years, but there is still a significant number of children living without a permanent home. See AFCARS report #29 from November 2022 and the summary screenshot below.
Today is Giving Tuesday in the US and start of the Holiday Giving Season.
If you think about it the entire community of professionals i.e. social workers and foster parents are “giving” people – throughout the year and not just on Giving TuesdayWe salute the entire Foster Care Community for the great work they do every day. Many in this community are involved with non-profits and fundraising. So here is how to figure out when Giving Tuesday falls every year:
Broadly there are two categories of foster kids. Traditional Foster Care involves caring for children who are “normal” kids not dis-similar to kids from a regular biological household in terms of behavioral issues. Therapeutic (or Treatment) foster kids are kids that need a higher level of care and attention to help resolve the trauma that they have suffered. Naturally, the therapeutic foster parent has a more difficult task. These parents are additionally trained and given additional support by the coordinating social worker representing the state, often through a contracted agency. Here are six things to know about Therapeutic Foster Care.
May is National Foster Care Month. And this year the focus is on kinship care and reunion with bio families (biological or birth families) where possible. Kinship This post explores the idea that neighbors can be considered as kin for the purposes of “keeping families together.”
May is National Foster Care Month. And it’s a great idea for Foster Parents to plan a party with Birth (Biological) Parents of the foster child. This can work wonders for foster kids where reunification is a possibility. Reunification is a core goal of the 2022 National Foster Care Month.
Mother’s Day on the second Sunday in May coincides with the National Foster Care Month. This year it is on Sunday May 8, 2022. So it’s timely to think of ways how everyone can celebrate Mother’s Day in the Foster Care ecosystem by saying “I love you.” But first some background.
We are delighted to celebrate the first anniversary of StartFosterCare.org and the May 2022 National Foster Care month. Kinship connections and stronger families is a focus of this year’s foster care month.See the Children’s Bureau and Child Welfare Information Gateway website.In this post we explain why culture is important to the foster child.
The foster parent recruitment process involves compulsory foster parent training. It is after training that a foster parent becomes a licensed foster parent in a US state. This is an important professional credential for us at StartFosterCare.org. As social work/foster care professionals always explain at StartFosterCare meetings, there are different levels of needs of foster kids. These levels of need included, levels of therapeutic or treatment care. Different levels of Foster Parenting can require different kinds of training.
According to academic research and our experience here is why Foster Parent training is so important:
Happy New Year 2022 to all our dear readers!
Frankly, we can’t believe that COVID continues into 2022. The foster care community including should not allow COVID to freeze them into inaction.
Life needs to go on and foster kids need to be cared for, even more as COVID continues into 2022.