Foster care is evolving by relying on children’s kin
I am a foster parent.  Before I share my perspective, a quick disclaimer: foster care varies hugely from state to state (and within California, it varies hugely from county to county).<p>Here, there has been a greater focus on kinship care and in-home aid (i.e. not removing the kids) primarily due to a shortage of foster parents.  There is a shortage of foster parents because the system treats foster parents like crap.<p>&gt; “I helped her do all of these things that I don’t think a foster parent would have done for her. … You’re not invested in that,” Gray said. “But for me, it was my granddaughter.”<p>Not to pick on the person quoted in this article, but this attitude exists all around the system; there is an implicit assumption that foster parents care less about the foster children than a neighborhood teenage baby-sitter hired for $8&#x2F;hour to watch kids.<p>&gt; Plus, they aren’t as likely to be moved to different schools or communities, and as a result they have better mental health and do better in school.<p>This is a very odd statement to make; the foster care system around here always tries to place children geographically close.  It&#x27;s logistically easier, so even lazy social workers will do this.  The one case where a child was placed with me for which there was willing and able kin was because it was not feasible for the child to make the mandatory visits with birth mom if placed so far away.<p>&gt; Some states also pay less to kinship caregivers than licensed foster care parents<p>Perverse incentives around remuneration dog <i>any</i> government program.  California does seem to have addressed a lot of these in the past couple of decades.<p>Not mentioned in TFA, but the increase in drug addictions is probably part of what is driving increases in kinship care; there are plenty of adults with serious drug addiction problems that have close family that does not.  With other forms of abuse and neglect, it tends to be something that has been a cross-generational pattern.