September 29, 2015

Adoption and Foster Care Facts

There are so many statistics that illuminate the foster care and adoption worlds, sharing the plight of the children, what their lives could and are as they grow, the agencies, families, and countries who advocate for them, and what it means to be a child growing up in these worlds.

We can’t even begin to share the wealth of information that’s out there, but here are some facts you perhaps didn’t know:

The number of US children in foster care is rising sharply, up about 15,000 this year from 2014. “Of the children in foster care a year ago, 52 percent were boys. Twenty-two percent were Hispanic, 24 percent black and 42 percent white. Just under 108,000 of them were available for adoption, up from 104,493 in 2013. During the 2014 fiscal year, 50,644 children were adopted from foster care, roughly the same as in 2013, while 22,392 youths in their late teens aged out of the system without being placed with a permanent family.”

Every day, month, and year that a child remains in foster care can be detrimental to their emotional and academic life, not to mention the lack of stability that will surely impact the ever-approaching reality of aging out. “Three years is the average length of time a child in foster care waits to be adopted. Roughly 55% of these children have had three or more placements. An earlier study found that 33% of children had changed elementary schools five or more times, losing relationships and falling behind educationally.”

78% of Americans think more could be done to encourage adoption, and 63% hold a favorable view of adoption in general. (What do you suppose the other 37% are thinking?!)

These interesting tables give you a comprehensive look at how many states and countries are involved in adoption, and how many adoptions took place last year.

Despite the numbers, is adoption as common as you think? “Adoption has been and remains rare. Between 1973 and 2002, the percentage of ever-married women 18–44 years of age who had adopted a child fluctuated between 1.3 and 2.2 percent. Men were twice as likely as women 18–44 years of age to have adopted a child. Among ever-married persons, men (3.8 percent) were more than 2.5 times as likely as women (1.4%) to have adopted.”

“Gay and lesbian parents are raising four percent of all adopted children in the United States” + other fascinating facts about gay and lesbian adoption.

Did any of these stats surprise you?