Issues: being a foster child in America

By Bridget Killian

The Kirkwood Call, 2018

There are 437,465 children in foster care in the United States.

Of these children, 36 percent are over the age of 10, according to the Administration for Children and Families, and children over the age of 10 are 50 percent less likely to get adopted based on a study done by Lutheran Family and Children’s Services of Missouri. According to Jennifer Beavers, a licensed clinical social worker in St. Louis, older children in foster care have a significant disadvantage due to the increased amount of emotional trauma they have experienced.

“For kids who are born into their birth families, [it’s like] their birth mom is standing on one side of a frozen lake,” Beavers said. “That birth mom says, ‘Come, we want to love you,’ and that kid starts walking out on the ice and the ice breaks out from underneath them..." continue reading