Foster care policy provides the legal procedures, practices, and bases required for foster care services. Foster care is usually provided to children who can not live with their parents, whose parents have passed on, and do not have any legal guardians to take care of them. The foster care system was implemented to ensure children are nurtured and supported and receive health care and education. The welfare system intends to achieve this by partnering with families, courts, private agencies, children involved, and other entities that share the same goals. However, according to landmark research conducted in 1960, most children who were taken by the system were reported to be stranded and lacked stability in their growth due to the permanent decision that the system set up for the kids. Reports indicated a substantial negative impact being monitored through the separation process of the kids from their parents. Issues being reported from the system were an increase in the number of children being admitted to foster care, a rapid increase in child abuse cases, and family separation, which caused much anger and mental health cases among the children and their parents. Over the years, the issues keep rising within the system, causing too much societal divide than solutions and begging the question of whether the foster care system should be abolished or whether the system should make reforms to enable the continuity of the program.
There has been a long debate about whether to abolish the foster care system or create reforms on how the system is handled. According to research studies, the foster care program often discriminates against the minority, thus inflicting too much pain and poverty, especially among the black community. While the system is supposed to protect children and their parents, it often creates a gap and separates them, causing trauma and affecting the development of children. Thus, I would position myself in the abolition of the program because the same problems have faced the system over the years, and nothing much is being done to reform the situation other than its deteriorating state. There has been an increase in the number of children being taken to foster care and a rise in the number of parents being taken to prison and mental health cases. For a system that is supposed to help parents and their children for better development and reform, the drift is becoming wider and impacting negative factors rather than the positives. While foster care is meant to be a temporary arrangement by the government and the social care workers to provide safety for children, research studies show that the system has radically changed, thus providing permanent residence for some children. Family being the critical core of a Child’s growth, detachment from the biological parents causes anger issues, feelings of neglect, and rebellion among the children (Kruz, 2023). Therefore, abolishing the system wins ground in the sense that the government would instead develop another system where the children grow up with their parents and offer close monitoring rather than separating them from their parents. Another strategy would be to implement strategies that aim at helping disturbed parents provide mental health care services at affordable prices to encourage parents to become better versions of themselves.
Most families that are involved in the foster care program are often going through poverty economic, and social factors often created through systematic racism. The economic factors then lead the families to have difficulties in meeting their daily needs and ability to take care of their children (Dettlaff et al., 2020). Therefore, another reason I would go for the abolishment of the foster care system program is that the system was created without first dealing with the roots of what was causing parents not to be competent enough for their families. Dealing with equality issues, ensuring that people from all races get equal opportunities, and providing social and economic opportunities would enable parents from all walks of life to have better living standards. As a country, we need to shift our focus on how we view the protection and safety of children by analyzing that taking children away from their unable parents is not a solution but providing equal opportunities to their parents would go a long way. Separating children from their families does more harm to society than help.
In conclusion, abolition requires the dismantling of the foster care system by creating policies that actively discourage racist policies and practices. Dealing with racism enables the social workers to provide care with open-minded policies whereby the system does not focus on the separation and painting the parents as bad people but rather makes both the parents and the children feel the safety and relevance of the system. At the same time, the government should actively engage in policies that aim at supporting minority families to help curb the poverty menace that leads to the inability to achieve basic needs within a home setup. Equal distribution of resources and opportunities enables society to reduce the increased requirement of the foster care system.
Reference
Dettlaff, A. J., Weber, K., Pendleton, M., Boyd, R., Bettencourt, B., & Burton, L. (2020). It is not a broken system; it is a system that needs to be broken: the upEND movement to abolish the child welfare system. Journal of Public Child Welfare, 14(5), 500–517. https://doi.org/10.1080/15548732.2020.1814542
Kruz, E. J. (2023). “No Matter What I loved Him Through It” A Qualitative Study of Child to Parent Aggression in Adoptive Families. https://doi.org/10.22215/etd/2023-15459
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