Aged Out Foster Care Youth

Aged-out is a term used to describe the children who have been emancipated from the foster care system. They make up a portion of the homeless in America today.
These young adults are put into the world, most with hardly any education, or resource’s to survive everyday life. There are many homeless people in the world, but aged-out young adults should not be one because of lack of knowledge or help from the Foster
Care System. In a study done in 2011, there were more than 26,000 emancipated children from the
Foster Care System. These children had made eighteen and could no longer stay under the system. Most were uneducated, and had not received resources, nor training prior to transitioning into the world. Now this has caused for more people to become homeless. The problem is the system has led to so many young adults living on the streets or wherever they could lay their heads at night. Some are even pregnant relying heavily on the government assistance. Meanwhile, others are incarcerated, or even went back to the bad living conditions and life they had before being taken from their parents. The system had failed to give them the resources needed to have a jumpstart on life. This is why there is the problem of so many homeless aged-out young adults in the world today. The Foster Care system just does not care about these children once they become teenagers and this should not be the case. The Government pays for these children to be taken good care of, and the system is not doing their job.

Because the system is failing to do their job, these children are being robbed of a chance to have a better life. They have already been taken or tossed aside by their parents, yet once they reach eighteen the system abandons them too. I know at eighteen I was not ready for adulthood. Why should they automatically be forced too make it on their own without any guidance or help?

The problem of sending these young adult into the world without any clue as to how to survive is wrong. The Government needs to find ways to end this problem, or reduce it. They should make sure the Foster Care System has programs in tack to help these people transition into the world. These young adults will care to be informed and