May is National Foster Care Month.
This year’s National Foster Care Month theme, “Engaging Youth, Building Supports, Strengthening Opportunities” emphasizes the importance of a child welfare system that authentically engages and supports young people who are preparing to leave foster care. At Adult & Child Health— and nation-wide— we are urgently searching for foster parents willing to open their homes and act as mentors to older youth.
Foster Parents as Youth Mentors
Due to past trauma and system involvement, youth in foster care often struggle to trust adults. Foster parents have the ability to be stable and consistent people in youths’ lives. By showing unconditional care and support, setting boundaries, and allowing youth to have a voice in their own stories, they help youth to rebuild their trust in others.
Many of A&C’s foster parents support youth from foster care well after they have “aged out” of the system. By providing long-lasting and permanent relationships with youth, these mentors help the youth cope with past trauma and learn how to heal. These relationships also provide a guide for what healthy relationships can look like for them in the future. Foster parents help youth with little to no family support access resources such as financial aid for college, resources for safe and stable housing, practice interviewing for jobs, and support and encouragement to make positive decisions that will help them achieve success in adulthood.
Pursuing Permanency: Upstream Preventions
In the context of child welfare, permanency means that a child has “a safe, stable and secure home and family, love, unconditional commitment, and lifelong support in the context of reunification, adoption, or legal guardianship.”
The first step toward achieving permanency is ensuring that adults have the supports and services they need to care for the children in their lives. At Adult & Child Health, we know the value of the continuum of care that our staff are able to provide to our patients and clients. Our comprehensive, wide-ranging services touch the whole health journey, from prevention and outreach to treatment and management/enabling services. The ultimate goal of A&C’s services in regards to permanency would be to eliminate the need for a child to be removed from their home due to unsafe circumstances.
The continuum of care is crucial in creating a safe, healthy, and care-free childhood for children in our communities. Service lines that don’t directly work with youth have the capability to positively impact adults, lifting them up and enabling them to care for the children in their lives in more effective and compassionate ways. Youth placed in A&C-licensed foster homes also have connections to the support our staff offer.
Primary Prevention: Programs and services designed to promote the general welfare of children and families.
Secondary Prevention: Services identified and provided to families who have identified risk factors for maltreatment.
Tertiary Prevention: Services provided after the occurrence of abuse or neglect. These services are designed to prevent the recurrence of abuse.
Most of Adult & Child Health’s services fall under primary prevention. It’s even described in our value statement:
“We strive for equitable, caring communities, where every child, adult, and family have opportunities to live healthy, purposeful lives.”
Our child welfare and wraparound teams play a large role in secondary prevention, with therapeutic foster care and behavioral health/therapy services stepping in to provide additional tertiary prevention.
The ability to focus on upstream efforts to build stronger families is a major positive outcome of Adult & Child’s continuum of care. According to Prevent Child Abuse Indiana, “by focusing especially on primary prevention, we can help mitigate the necessity of the other two.”
Fostering as a Community Support
In cases where it is unsafe for a child to remain in their home of origin, a foster family steps in to provide appropriate care and a loving, temporary home. The foster family is connected to an array of resources to support themselves and the child, while the parent(s) of origin are also supported in taking steps toward reunification whenever possible.
Permanency is vital for nurturing the safety and well-being of children and youth in foster care. Permanency might look like:
- Reunification with a child’s family
- Being placed with members of their extended family in guardianship or adoption
- Becoming members of new families through adoption
As youth in foster care age, it is imperative to provide them with the supports they need to transition into adulthood.
Many youth in the foster care system experience multiple episodes (removal from their home) of foster care. Many also experience multiple placement changes over an episode of foster care. This instability can lead to poor overall outcomes for the youth.
In the state of Indiana in 2021, only 62% of youth who existed the foster care system were doing so due to permanency.
According to a study done by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, youth who had faced foster care experienced higher rates of incarceration, unemployment, and young parenthood by the age of 21 compared to their peers who had not experienced the foster care system. They were also less likely to have health insurance, a high school diploma or GED, and stable housing.
Studies show us that a person’s brain experiences a period of major growth and development from ages 14 to 25. Vital skills and tools like planning, decision-making, judgment, and coping skills are developed during this time. Adolescence is also a crucial time to counteract the harm that may have been caused by stressful and traumatic experiences in one’s youth. Exposing the adolescent brain to developmentally healthy experiences helps it “rewire” itself.
Supportive, age-appropriate social services and resources— like many of those provided by the staff at Adult & Child Health— are instrumental in setting system-impacted youth on a path to a bright future.
If you’re interested in learning more about opening your home to youth in need of a safe temporary home and a compassionate mentor, please call 317.893.0207 to talk to a licensing specialist or fill out an inquiry form here.
