How to change foster care A parents role in a childs live runs much deeper than just providing them with the bare necessities of life. Parents guide their children through life and help them develop important life skills. Adolescence is a very difficult time and without a mentor one could easily get off track. Interactions between a parent and a child are crucial to establish a basis for individual development and life away from parental guardians.
Now imagine that you're a teenager in foster care. When these young adults approach the age of 18 they are all on their own. The foster care community turns a cold shoulder and you no longer have anyone on your side. The luxuries that parents offer are no longer available.
In the past 10 years this has happened to around 200,000 teens in foster care.
Often times they haven't established critical skills that are needed in everyday life. They begin to face challenges as soon as they depart from their foster homes.
We have chosen to tackle this issue because it is very widespread and often ignored by society. Not many people even know about this issue. This is a very broad topic as we are covering many issues which are all intertwined. Aging out of foster care can lead to many problems including; drug addiction, homelessness/poor living conditions, lack of social skills, lack of educational funding, and various other important everyday skills such as cooking or doing taxes.
Sadly many of these foster kids are not provided with greatly needed help for these issues. Actually quite the contrary. These young adults are abandoned and left to the streets once they hit their eightieth birthday. Every year, approximately 18,000 youth will emancipate or "age­out” from the foster care system when they reach age 18 or finish high school. Youth in foster care often do not get the help they need with high school completion, employment, accessing health care, or continued educational opportunities. Studies of youth who have left foster care have shown they are more likely than those in the general population to not finish high school and become

unemployed. They are also more likely to become dependent on public assistance. A number of studies in the past 20 years have found much higher rates of homelessness among former foster youth who aged out of foster care. In fact, about 25% of youth who were placed in foster care experience one of more days of homelessness after leaving care. This problem is huge in the U.S. right now as there are currently 402,000 people in foster care. Many of those people will face hardships and struggle to find a safe living environment. Now the question is what should we do with with these kids? The government needs to put their tax dollars to work and continue helping these people past the age of 18. The program we are suggesting to implement is not that very complex. We believe that their should be stations in major cities across the United
States that can help give life advice to foster kids that will soon be aging out of foster care. This program would include different lessons that are usually taught by your parents such. One class could have household skills such as; cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry. A separate class would teach about how getting job and going to a college. At the moment there are no such programs that are working towards this problem. A main reason that no one is helping these kids is because the problem is not well known. The victims of foster care don't like to talk about this problem with others so most americans