I spent much of my childhood first homeless with my mentally ill mother, then in the foster care system — shuffled from home to home, often hungry and abused, always invisible.
I never knew the identity of my biological father. The system responsible for my care was unable to locate him or reunite us — if it even tried.
In my early 40s, after a nonprofit heard me speak about my memoir, someone connected me with a family-finding specialist. She used widely available consumer DNA technology — 23andMe and Ancestry.com — and basic genealogical matching to search for relatives.
Within weeks, I found my father. Working with a nonprofit that has done this very thing before, I reached out and connected to the family.
“If I had known, I would have kidnapped you from foster care,” said the woman who would have been my stepmother. They never even knew I existed.
The technology that reunited us cost less than $100.
By contrast, the foster care system has been estimated to cost between $40,000 to $200,000 per child, per year, depending on the services and support a child needs. Yet more than 15,000 young people age out of care annually, and roughly 20% become homeless almost immediately. Fewer than 13% graduate from college. Most, like I did, leave with no family, no medical history and no sense of identity.
This is not because family doesn’t exist. It’s because we don’t use the tools that could find them.
We live in an era where DNA databases help solve decades-old murders, identify disaster victims and reunite families separated by war and migration. Consumer genetic platforms now contain tens of millions of profiles, enabling rapid identification of relatives — sometimes dozens or even hundreds. Meanwhile, foster youth are typically subjected to cursory record checks, outdated databases and under-resourced searches that stop long before technology’s real potential begins.
What if DNA testing — now affordable, accurate and widely used — were added to the toolkit for foster youth? Not mandatory. Optional. Ethically governed. Professionally supported.
Working alongside social workers and under court supervision, DNA samples could be collected with informed consent and strict privacy protections. Matching could be conducted on behalf of minor children, with safeguards around disclosure, contact and safety. If we trust technology to identify criminals, why don’t we trust it to identify family?
If you discovered you had an unknown child, niece, nephew or cousin in foster care, wouldn’t you want to know? Wouldn’t you step forward? The evidence is clear: Children are overwhelmingly better off with safe, willing relatives than in institutional care or serial placements with strangers.
Of course, privacy and safety concerns must be taken seriously. Genetic data requires strong guardrails, transparency and limits on use. But so do the needs of the hundreds of thousands of children currently waiting in U.S. foster care. We cannot allow bureaucratic inertia or fear of complexity to deny children access to tools that already help millions of people find their families.
My story isn’t a miracle. It’s a missed opportunity — one the system could have made possible decades earlier with technology that is now readily available.
We can’t undo the past for these children. But we can maximize their chances for future permanency without breaking the bank. Technology alone won’t fix foster care. But refusing to use it ensures we remain stuck in a system that supervises children instead of connecting them.
Foster youth deserve more than oversight. They deserve belonging. And sometimes, all it takes is a vial of spit — and the right to search.
