Foster Care Children Too Often Become Homeless Adults

The Safe Families dinner and Rob Henderson memoir I wrote about last month got me thinking more about “the relationship between foster care and homelessness”: That’s the title of a paper delivered at a 1996 conference hosted by the American Public Welfare Association and based on client files and case data from 21 homeless service organizations located in every region of the United States. Of the 1,134 homeless individuals covered by the study, 36 percent had a foster care history.

The paper’s authors, Nan P. Roman and Phyllis B. Wolfe, determined that “the foster care system can fail to deal adequately with problems caused by sexual abuse, physical abuse, or troubled or dysfunctional families — that is to say, with the very issues that often lead to foster care placements in the first place.” Why? “Multiple placements can preclude the development of the nurturing bonds that have been shown to be critical to normal personal development.” Children moved from foster family to foster family come to believe “that the way to deal with problems is to leave and go somewhere new.”

What if children do get to stay in one home for a long time? Roman and Wolfe contended that children are often less likely to experience “unconditional love and acceptance. . . . The foster care system can neglect to address adequately children’s mental or physical health problems. [That leads to] feelings of insecurity, both as children and as adults.” Sometimes, of course, “caregivers assigned by the foster care system can themselves be abusive” — and Roman and Wolfe provided several case studies.

They also observed that failure to “learn the nature of stable family life” goes along with other failures: “The foster care system can also fail to help children achieve educational and training goals, which can lead to depressed salaries and poverty (precursors of homelessness) in adulthood. . . . Accustomed to being ‘wards of the state,’ children in foster care may have difficulty making the transition from dependence to independence.”

Other 1990s studies also found more homelessness among those who had been in foster care than among others with similar social and economic backgrounds. A Minnesota study of 331 homeless adults showed 39 percent with foster care backgrounds. Those placed in foster care as children had longer experiences of homelessness than their non-fostered peers. A Chicago study of homeless youth found that 45 percent had been wards of the Department of Child and Family Services.

In 2001 American Homelessness: A Reference Handbook offered a collection of academic work. Principal author Mary Ellen Hombs and her colleagues found that “people with a foster care history tend to become homeless at an earlier age than those who do not have a foster care history. . . . Childhood placement in foster care can correlate with a substantial increase in the length of a person’s homeless experience. The foster care system often fails to help children deal with the problems that result from circumstances that caused them to be removed from their homes [including] physical or sexual abuse, parents with alcohol or substance abuse illness, family dissolution, etc.”

The researchers also concluded that “foster care can also fail to help children deal with problems that arise from foster care placements in abusive homes or facilities. . . . Alcohol and other substance abuse illnesses and mental illness play a significant role in the relationship between foster care and homelessness. . . . Young people emancipated from foster care often lack the independent living skills that would allow them to establish a household. . . . Children who are moved from home to home over an extended period of time (foster care and/or unofficial placements) learn to deal with problems by leaving them behind.”

The conclusion: “[W]hat happens to children has a lifelong impact on them. When you see a homeless adult, it is quite possible that they are homeless because of people and systems that failed them as children. . . . A better job must be done in supporting and strengthening families (particularly those in crisis) in order to keep children out of the foster care system. . . . Once children are in the foster care system, extraordinary measures should be taken to move them quickly into a permanent living situation (family reunification or adoption), taking all necessary steps to avoid multiple placements. . . . If children have experienced multiple placements, a much more directed effort should be made to help them gain the skills and other resources necessary to move to successful independence.”

Easier said than done.