What Do You See?

What do you see when you watch the nightly news or read the paper? What do you see when you are "forced" to drive through the inner city or some other area of town you think is dangereous or scarry?

Do you see what I see?

I bet not. I see the utter colapse of life. I see people failing each other for all sorts of reasons. I see so much more than I alone can ever impact.

May is National Foster Care Month.

Foster Care is a strange phenomenon. It is a thing created by good intentions and filled with people who mean well and try hard.

The task at hand is to save kids. Sometimes it's simple. Physically save them from a death born of torture. Sometimes it's just to keep them from being tortured. Often times, it is a thing so much more complicated. Verbal and emotional abuse is a thing not easily identified or measured. Who gets to be the deciding judge of what is ok and what is not? Who gets to say why a raised voice in one family setting is acceptable and in another is abuse?

It's a fine line drawn in dust my friends.

Those people with the big hearts and good intentions are ill equiped to do this task. They have little for tools at their disposal. A foster family gets just a few hundred dollars a month to provide everything for the foster child. Often the foster kids get WIC checks, but let me tell you, it's less help than you would think if you've never experienced it. The other main tool they have to use is words.

Yeah, that's what I said. Words. A case worker spends most of their time talking. Talking to the birth parents, to the care givers, to the child, to the DA, the judge, the GAL, to any therapy option that might even be a chance for the child and the list goes on and on and on.

All that futile talking takes a toll. Case workers burn out fast. The turnover is high.

By June, our Little Miss will have had 4 different case workers in 16 months. I can't even begin to number how many people further out in the case have switched over since the start.

Currently more than 513,000 children in America are in foster care. Nearly half of these kids are over 10. Each year more than 20,000 young adults "age out" of foster care. You've seen the TV stories of these kids. They are 18 and alone. They have no place to land, no place to call home. Even if they are an exception and have a job or are in college, they have no place to spend a holiday and no one to spend it with. Most often they have no diploma or GED, no credit, no skills to get or keep a job, no ability to find a place to live or open a checking account. At 18 they become homeless and hopeless. You can guess what happens to most of them, drugs, prostitution, jail, and death are just a few.

If nothing changes in the foster system, by the year 2020 we will see:

14 million confirmed cases of child abuse and neglect

22,500 children will die of abuse or neglect before their 5th birthday

9,000,000+ kids will have first hand experience with the foster care system

300,000+ kids will have "aged out" and be faltering or failing in society

99,000 "aged out" foster kids will be homeless



* Information gathered from Waukesha County Health & Human Services