Overview of Foster Care in the US

Introduction
In the U.S. more children are being removed to foster care, seriously stressing the child welfare system and becoming new statistics in the child welfare debates. Many changes in the family appear to have had a destructive impact on the socialization of children and youth. Among the consequences that social scientists have been most worried about are the following:

1.Some research indicates that the "total contact time" between parents and children has declined as much as 40 percent during the past few decades.

2.Many social agencies established to help children and youth are too overload with problems to provide services effectively. William Zinsmeister has described how "many child protection agencies are now doing little more than preventing murder, and sometimes they fail even to do that." For example, one Maryland social worker, when asked why a six-year-old had not been removed from a known crack house run by his mother, responded that there were "twenty similar cased on his desk, and that he didn't have time to go through the time-consuming process of taking a child from a parent" unless there was an immediate emergency" (Zinsmeister, 1992, pp. 30-37).

Child welfare has been a category that has covered child abuse, child neglect, foster, care and adoption, but not welfare, or Aid to Families with Dependent Children. In public opinion and public policy, the universe of child welfare is peopled by deviated parents and unlucky children from families of all income groups, while welfare is a program for poor people. This division tends to downplay the reality that children in foster care and at risk of entering foster care are overwhelming the children of the poor (Lamer, Stevenson, & Behrman. 1998).