Thinking of Foster Kids

I am not a foster parent, though I have been a "foster to adopt" parent.  But reading some blogs of former foster kids and the status of my own Fiona, keep the foster care "system" (and sometimes I use the word loosely) very present in my mind.  I also work in housing and often times a significant portion of the client base I work with are aged out young foster kids.

Even without the really nitty gritty experience that so many people have, I can see that the system is broken.  In my personal experience, Fiona (who I could not adopt but who remains my daughter in all other senses, as we are all very intimately connected with one another) was moved from an RTC 15 minutes from me because it was "too expensive."  I was actually told by the state workers on the treatment team that the school was too expensive.  So they sent her to a far less expensive group home where in a matter of months she decompensated and was hospitalized for months because they could not find an appropriate facility. From there more than a year at a treatment facility that specialized in stabilization and then the move last year to the Great School in the City.  Now that is a great placement, don't get me wrong.  And I KNOW it is not an inexpensive placement.  I worry all the time that she will do so well they will try to balance the bottom line and "step her down" again. Despite all my advocacy efforts, I realistically have no say in anything.  I can make noise.  I can try and make other people who do have a legal right to answer, see what I am saying.  But it has historically been tough slogging.

I have read blogs where foster kids are essentially cut loose at 18 and off they go.  Out into the world with no safety net.  Where is the logic in that?  The thing is, parenting for me is way less about the legal ties and nothing about getting a check.  It is a commitment between the child and I.  Obviously in our overburdened care system, this isn't the way it is typically viewed.  Though Pollyanna that I am, I hold out hope that there are foster parents out there who let a child continue to live with them when the checks stop coming. 

In my work, what I see is that the foster kids who have "aged out" are woefully unprepared for tenancy.  They are still kids.  Even if they are 19 or 20 years old by the time I lease to them, most of them wind up with such eggregious lease violations that I can not help them maintain the tenancy.

What they need are parents.  Who have them to dinner on the weekends and talk about things like following the rules (even when you think they are stupid) and ask if they paid the rent, etc.  Failing having parents who can and will do that, why isn't there a mentor program where people could form relationships with teens who have aged out.   Someone to have them to dinner at Thanksgiving.  At Christmas.  To stop in on their birthday with a cake, even if the teen is going out with peers on their own.  It seems so obvious.  How come no one does it?