By Shari F. Shink
Black children made up about 14% of all children in the United States in 2021, but about 22% of the foster care population. For Latino youngsters, those same percentages were approximately 19 and 22, respectively. And the highest disproportionality is seen among Native American children.
By comparison, white kids comprised about 49% of America’s child population but only 43% of all those in foster care.
Kids of color face the same problems that all children who enter the system encounter — overburdened courts, attorneys unfamiliar with their needs and bureaucratic indifference to the importance of stable placements. But they also experience racial discrimination, biased welfare practices and economic hardships that make it harder for them to thrive and family reunification more difficult to achieve.
But when you really focus on the why of these disproportionate numbers, poverty is typically a good place to begin. People who live below the poverty line, or who struggle to make ends meet, are more likely to encounter police, hospitals and social service workers who are trained to look for any deficiencies in parenting, no matter how loving the home.
Abuse should never be ignored, but not all neglect is equal. Kids who are going hungry, for instance, would be better served by having their household helped financially rather than being sent to live with strangers. The same is the case with truancy. Give the parents more help to do better. Don’t automatically move to DEFCON 1 and the foster system option.
Across America, about 47 percent of families with children in foster care live below the federal poverty level, which was $25,820 for a family of three in 2024 and $31,200 for a family of four. While the US Census Bureau’s most recent survey showed that the 2022 poverty rate for Black Americans had fallen to a historic low of 17.1%, it was still far above the national average of 11.5%. For Latino families living in the United States, the poverty rate in 2023 was about 14.5%.
In my decades-long career as a lawyer and advocate for children in foster care, I only represented three children who came from wealthy families. That wealth meant those families had options their low-income counterparts did not have. That might include money for the father to move out of the home if he was the one suspected of abuse, or money to hire counselors and other trained professionals to help repair the deficiencies in the home.
I also suspect parents from better-off homes are looked on more favorably by the system and the people who operate within it. Like it or not, there’s an inherent bias about poverty. Adults stuck in it are less likely to be given second chances, or third ones, even if all they need not to lose their children to the foster care system is a small amount of extra financial assistance.
Guaranteed income programs around the country have shown how beneficial even $500 more a month can be in allowing families to buy necessities such as food and clothing for their children, and possibly avoid accusations of neglect. A recent 18-month experiment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, demonstrated how $500 a month relieved anxiety for poor parents and allowed them more time to spend with their children and on their needs. Similarly, pandemic relief programs helped drive down poverty rates across the board and their demise saw the same rates soar, including for child poverty.
I’d call $500 a month a small price to pay for keeping an otherwise loved and well-cared-for kid out of foster care. Still, money alone is not the answer, and I believe we already have the financial resources. We do need to manage them better and put them where the actual problems lie. We need to rethink everything that is wrong with the system and act to fix it.
The upEND Movement would have us abolish the entire child welfare system and start from scratch. I would not take it that far. I do, however, believe that as much as 30%of the families who get mired in the system should never have been in it in the first place. That’s tens of thousands of children, especially Black and Latino children, traumatized for no real reason except the system’s own inadequacies. There are real reasons Black adults distrust the foster care systemmore than any other group.
There are some critical approaches that might address the problem:
- Create a system where three lay judges educated about the foster care system are the ones deciding a child’s future. They could be doctors, lawyers, social workers, homemakers, anyone willing and able. One of the three judges should be from the same race and/or culture as the family under evaluation.
- Expand efforts to recruit people of color for all roles within the system, from foster parents to child advocates. Look for people who’ve experienced the system firsthand, either as a child or parent, and know from the inside what’s broken.
- Have the Department of Social Services, or whichever agency oversees foster care in each state, help pay for students of color to earn social work degrees in exchange for a two-year work commitment post-graduation.
As it stands, the foster care system doesn’t work well for anyone, whether they should or shouldn’t be in it. Their disproportionate numbers mean Black, Indigenous and Latino families are more likely to suffer the consequences of being dragged into it.
The child welfare system is not working well for many of the children and parents that come into contact with it, and Black and brown families disproportionately bear the brunt of that. We must engage communities of color in new ways and commit to keeping Black and Latino families whole whenever and however we can.
