MAKING THE CASE FOR TEEN ADOPTION

THE RIGHT TO BELONG

Children and youth have the right to live in a family with adults who love them and who are committed to helping them grow into healthy adults.

Into foster care through no fault of their own To secure the right to a safe childhood, every state has set up a child welfare system that responds when kids are at risk. In extraordinary cases, when challenges exceed the capacity of parents to create a safe home, child protection workers remove children from their parents’ care. In about 25% of cases, the parents lose their legal rights to parent the child.

Children and youth in an urgent situation

When a child loses her parents through termination of parental rights, there is an implied promise: child welfare professionals will assure that she is connected with other adults who will provide the love and security of family.

While those people are being located, the awesome responsibility of parenting goes to the State. When the State is the parent, youth live in foster homes or other placements designed to meet the needs of kids who have experienced trauma, abuse and neglect.

These placements were designed to be temporary.

A promise largely unfulfilled

The public child welfare system is swamped. Too few resources and too many children in need of healing results in a system that responds best to immediate crisis and slowly to the needs of youth already removed from danger.

Removed from family, displaced by the child welfare system, and invisible to society, these teens far too often become our community’s most lonely and disengaged adults. They leave our foster care system largely unprepared and without the family relationships required to sustain them emotionally or financially as they enter adulthood.

At Ampersand Families we’re creating a new model
that engages young people, caring adults and community to fulfill the promise of a committed, loving family for every youth.

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THE HUMAN AND FINANCIAL TOLL

Severed relationships. Little hope.

When compared to their same-age peers, former foster youth at age 21 are:

Less Likely to have a high school diploma to be pursuing higher education to be earning a living wage More Likely to have experienced economic hardships to have become involved with the criminal justice system as a victim and as an offender

By age 19

nearly half of young women who have aged out of foster care have become pregnant. By age 20, nearly half of that group has experienced a second pregnancy (Courtney, 2007).

In Minnesota

70% of homeless young adults interviewed were previously in some type of out-of-home care (Wilder Research, 2007).

Disengaged citizens. Increased costs.

With each youth leaving foster care into homelessness, poverty, unemployment or the criminal justice system, the community loses a potentially engaged citizen who contributes to building a strong community and gains a lonely adult often in need of continued, expensive public support.

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LIFE-LONG GAINS Compared to peers who remain in foster care, youth who are adopted are likely experience improvements in: economic outcomes school performance cognitive functions overall health social skill

SHORT-TERM SAVINGS

For each child adopted instead of remaining in foster care until age 18, the community saves an estimated $140,000 in out-of-home placement costs. (Barth, Lee, Wildfire & Guo, 2006)

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There is so much yet to be done.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. -Buckminster Fuller