80% FAILURE RATE:Maltreated Kids In Natural Homes Still Do Better Than Foster Care
Posted by Forever on July 7, 2008
Foster care systems will continue to churn out walking wounded
4 out of 5 times!
(We need to protect the children from the protectors!)
Imagine for a moment that you went to a doctor and he told you the following:
“80 percent of my patients don’t get any better…”
“A lot of the time, they get worse…”
“One-third of the time, I commit malpractice….”
But, the doctor continues,
“if you’ll just pay me even more money than I already get and build me a fancy new hospital, I’m sure I can reduce my failure rate to only
about 60 percent. Do we have a deal…?”
Odds are you’d look for another doctor.
But what if all the other doctors told you the same thing? And what if none of them let on that there were, in fact, better treatments with fewer side effects?
Odds are you’d be furious.
Now, consider a study released on April 7, 2005 by a large, Washington State-based foster-care provider, Casey Family Programs, and Harvard Medical School. The study used case records and interviews to assess the status of young adult “alumni” of foster care.
When compared to adults of the same age and ethnic background who did not endure foster care:
Only 20 percent of the alumni could be said to be “doing well.”
Thus, foster care failed for 80 percent.
- They have double the rate of mental illness.
- Their rate of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was double the rate for Iraq War veterans.
- The former foster children were three times more likely to be living in poverty – and fifteen times less likely to have finished college.
- And nearly one-third of the alumni reported that they had been abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home.
The authors went on to design a complex mathematical formula to attempt to figure out how much they could improve these outcomes if every single problem besetting the foster care system were magically fixed. Their answer: 22.2 percent.
Even if one argues that foster care didn’t cause all of these problems, clearly foster care didn’t cure them. Yet the authors of the study recommend only more of the same: Pour even more money into foster care to “fix” it to the point that maybe the rotten outcomes could be reduced by 22.2 percent.
Want to read more? Read Full Story Here
Courtesy of : NCCPR by Richard Wexler: A Brief Analysis of the Casey Family Programs Northwest Foster Care Alumni Study
THE EVIDENCE IS IN
Foster Care vs. Keeping Families Together:
The Definitive Study
NCCPR long has argued that many children now trapped in foster care would be far better off if they had remained with their own families and those families had been given the right kinds of help.
Turns out that’s not quite right.
In fact, many children now trapped in foster care would be far better off if they remained with their own families even if those families got only the typical help (which tends to be little help, wrong help, or no help) commonly offered by child welfare agencies.
That’s the message from the largest study ever undertaken to compare the impact on children of foster care versus keeping comparably maltreated children with their own families. The study was the subject of a front-page story in USA Today.
The full study is available here.
The study looks at outcomes for more than 15,000 children. It compares foster children not to the general population but to comparably maltreated children left in their own homes. The result: On measure after measure the children left in their own homes do better.
In fact, it’s not even close.
Children left in their own homes are far less likely to become pregnant as teenagers, far less likely to wind up in the juvenile justice system and far more likely to hold a job for at least three months than comparably maltreated children who were placed in foster care. Want More? READ FULL STORY HERE
Courtesy of:National Coalition for Child Protection Reform / 53 Skyhill Road (Suite 202) /Alexandria, Va. 22314 (703) 212-2006 / info@nccpr.org / http://www.nccpr.org
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