Foster Care Statistics

• Posted: June 30, 2009
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• Author: brendan
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• Filed under: Life
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• Tags: No tags set for this entry.

I have had several requests for the statistics I shared this weekend:

There are more than 523,000 children and youth in the U.S. foster care system, a 90% increase since 1987. 53% are male and 47% female. The average age of a child entering foster care is 10 while 40,000 infants enter the system each year.

Statistically, within a year of aging out of the foster care system (some sources say within 2.4 years):

• 33% will experience homelessness
• 37% will not graduate
• 51% will be unemployed
• 37% will have some type of mental disorder due to experiences within the foster care system
• 84% will become a parent

*Casey Family Programs National Center for Resource Family Support

80 percent of prison inmates have been through the foster care system.
National Association of Social Workers

Children in foster care are three to six times more likely than children not in care to have emotional, behavioral and developmental problems, including conduct disorders, depression, difficulties in school and impaired social relationships. Some experts estimate that about 30% of the children in care have marked or severe emotional problems. Various studies have indicated that children and young people in foster care tend to have limited education and job skills, perform poorly in school compared to children who are not in foster care, lag behind in their education by at least one year, and have lower educational attainment than the general population.

Children died as a result of abuse in foster care 5.25 times more often than children in the general population. 2.1 percent of all child fatalities took place in foster care. While this may seem like a relatively low number, we must consider the contrast in population between children in the general population versus children in foster care. In 1997, there were nearly 71 million children in the general population (99.6%), but only 302 thousand in state care (.4%) in state care. As state care is supposed to be a ’safe haven’, the number of fatalities should be less or at least equal to what it is in the general population of children. By this standard, there should have been less than .4% of child fatalities occurring in foster care, however, there was 5.25 times that amount. (31 states reporting)

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