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Sep

6

Employers pay extra to foster parents


As a follow up on this post, here’s more from Employee Benefit News:

About 11% of employers offer assistance to foster parents this year, up from 6% last year, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. The benefit is more common at large firms than at smaller businesses. It’s also more common in the finance and service industries than in other industries.

And some other stats on foster care, nationally:

Most foster children enter the foster care system because of neglect, physical abuse or sexual abuse by a birth parent. An estimated 518,000 children were in foster care across the United States in 2004, and about 23% of them were available for adoption, according to the U.S. Administration for Children and Families.

More than half of foster children return to their birth parents. For the other half, authorities have revoked the birth parent’s rights, often because of abandonment, abuse, neglect, mental illness, alcohol or drug addiction, incarceration, violence against family members or failure to provide support. That’s when the child becomes available for adoption.

About 55% of children who exited foster care in 2003 were reunited with birth parents or primary caretakers, 18% were adopted, 15% went to live with a relative or guardian, 8% were emancipated and 4% had other outcomes, according to the Child Welfare Information Gateway, a service of the Department of Health and Human Services, Children’s Bureau and Administration for Children and Families.

The median age of the children in foster care is almost 11 years. About 18% of foster children stayed in foster care less than one month, while 32% stayed between one and 11 months, and 20% stayed between 12 and 23 months.

The other 30% remained in foster care two years or longer. Nearly 10% of children who entered foster care in fiscal 2002 were re-entering the system within 12 months of a previous discharge, the agencies report.

Good news? Bad news?

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 1:21 pm September 6th, 2006 in Politics 

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