Foster care is correlated with a range of negative outcomes compared to the general population. Children in foster care have a high rate of ill health, particularly psychiatric conditions such as anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. One third of foster children in a US study reported abuse from a foster parent or other adult in the foster home. Nearly half of foster children in the US become homeless when they reach the age of 18, and the poverty rate is three times higher among foster care alumni than in the general population. By country
Australia
In Australia foster care was known as "boarding-out". Foster care had its early stages in South Australia in 1867 and stretched to the second half of the 19th century. It is said that the system was mostly run by women until the early 20th century. Then the control was centered in many state childrens departments. "Although boarding-out was also implemented by non-government[al] child rescue organizations, many large institutions remained. These institutions assumed an increasing importance from the late 1920s when the system went into decline." The system was re-energized in the postwar era, and in the 1970s. The system is still the main structure for "out-of-home care." The system took care of both local and foreign children. "The first adoption legislation was passed in Western Australia in 1896, but the remaining states did not act until the 1920s, introducing the beginnings of the closed adoption that reached it peak in the period 1940–1975.
The main reasons for children being adopted in the United Kingdom had been unmarried mothers giving up their children for adoption and stepparents adopting their new partners children". United States
In the United States, foster care started as a result of the efforts of Charles Loring Brace. "In the mid 19th Century, some 30,000 homeless or neglected children lived in the New York City streets and slums." Brace took these children off the streets and placed them with families in most states in the country. Brace believed the children would do best with a Christian farm family. He did this to save them from "a lifetime of suffering" He sent these children to families by train, which gave the name The Orphan Train Movement. "This lasted from 1853 to the early 1890s  and transported more than 120,000 250,000? children to new lives." When Brace died in 1890, his sons took over his work of the Childrens Aid Society until they retired. The Childrens Aid Society created "a foster care approach that became the basis for the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997" called Concurrent Planning. This greatly impacted the foster care system.