Why is there a foster care CRISIS? 🚨

We have had people ask us recently ‘so why is there a foster care crisis? And what does that mean?’ Fostering has a long, interesting and at times ugly history, starting out in the late 1800s when children were ‘boarded out’ – send to board at homes with other families after being mistreated in large group homes or institutions that were privately run or run by faith-based organisations. ‘Boarding out’ was the first type of family-based foster care here. Australia has ebbed and flowed within the past 100 years or so, swinging between shutting many institutional group homes in preference for private family-based care and then swinging back again, recognising that for some children, family-based care may not be suitable.

In the early to mid 1900s, laws were introduced within each State and Territory (at different times in different ways) that all basically allowed the government to intervene and remove children from parents who were deemed ‘unfit’, if the children were truant, if expectant mothers were unwed etc. Over time, these laws have changed and developed into more specifically the states having powers to remove children and place them in ‘care’ if they do not have a parent ‘willing and able’ to care for them.

In Australia, foster carers have always been considered volunteers of sorts, receiving allowances and reimbursements for caring for foster children but not paid a wage to foster children in the same way as you are when employed in a job. Now, this worked for many decades because, before the late 1900s, there were typically one stay-at-home parent in two parent households, allowing one person to be the ‘volunteer’ while one was the ‘worker’, working away from the home. However, we all know things have changed and most of us if in two-parent households, are dual wage earners due to the high costs of living here in Australia.

So, if we have two full time workers in the home, there is less time and capacity to have one stay-at-home volunteer to meet the needs of children in their home.

In a time when households are struggling to make ends meet themselves, we are now seeing more families affected by drug and alcohol misuse, poor mental health, domestic and family violence, all of which is increasing in general in our communities. So we now need more carers to meet the needs of children affected by these issues, yet we have less capacity to do so as a community.

Add a global covid-19 pandemic and we have even many more families experiencing stress – stress which affects their capacity to meet their children’s needs and increases reliance on negative coping skills like drinking or drugs. This results in more children needing care than ever before.

I’m not going to paint a rose-coloured glasses picture for you; I’ll tell you the truth. There are children as young as 4 in ‘residential’ type settings, because we do not have family-based placements with foster carers. Resi care used to be considered an alternative to family based care for teenagers; now we are placing kids in resis not because we can’t match them – we don’t even have options for them.

Resi care isn’t the same as institutional care, like when we had children being ‘boarded out’ from them; they are staffed by energetic, caring youth worker who want to help kids too. But residentials are no place for young kids, who ask staff when they start their shift, “Who is the mummy today?”

Some might ask, ‘If you can’t find a safe, stable family environment for them, why are they being removed?’ You can debate this until you’re blue in the face but ultimately, the system is so over-burdened and so under-resourced right now that the children entering the care system really are in dire need. The courts do not allow children to be removed from their families for just any old reason – it is due to significant risk of harm and abuse. So they need to come into care.

Its not all doom and gloom though. Just as fostering has changed significantly since boarding out became a ‘thing’, fostering is now changing once again. No longer do we just want or need two-carer households where one parent is the full time stay-at-home parent who can be a foster child’s everything. We know better than ever before that children need a village to wrap around them – they need primary and respite carers, youth worker and support staff, aunts, uncles, grandparent-figures and the like, to help them have a well-rounded, fulfilled and secure upbringing. And they need to be from a range of backgrounds, cultures and genders to ensure we have the right people to support the right children.

So, what role could you offer? Could you be a mentor who picks up a child on Fridays and takes them to a group support? Could you be a respite carer who offers Saturday nights once a fortnight, to give the child a break (and the primary carers too)? Could you be an aunt or uncle or grandparent figure who supports a primary placement, cheering kids on at sports carnivals, ballet recitals or singing concerts? Or could you take on that 4 year old who really just wants to have a parent to call their own.

As we love to say here at Tribe, it takes a village. Can your village make space for a foster child?

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Until next time,

Mel - Co Founder