Youth who “Age Out” of Foster Care: Troubled Lives, Troubling Prospects

Overview When children are abused, neglected, or abandoned by their parents or when parents’ own difficulties (such as drug addiction, mental illness, and incarceration) leave them unable to provide adequate care, other relatives often step in. If no family members are able to take in these children, a court often places them in the care of other families or in institutions. And so, they enter the foster care system. Today, more than 500,000 children in America live in foster care – about 8 out of every 1,000 children.1 This is a vulnerable population. Children who enter foster care have emotional, behavioral, developmental, and health problems that reflect the difficult family and environmental circumstances that caused them to be removed from their homes in the first place. Most of the children in foster care return to their families or are adopted (often by their foster parents), but not all. In 2000, more than 19,000 of the oldest children left foster care – or “aged out” in the parlance of child protective services – and many were pretty much on their own.2 Usually, this happened when they turned 18.3