As teenagers, we were separated from our families and entered New York’s child welfare system. Our stories reflect the experiences of too many other children who have been – and continue to be – robbed of their homes, families and childhoods because of the foster system.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of kids pass through a system that inflicts lasting harm to generations of children and their families, disproportionately those who are Black, like us. Many are housed in institutional settings that feel more like a prison, where they face severe, isolating conditions that include a lack of privacy, strict bathroom limitations, poor quality food, and inadequate medical care — particularly mental health care — all while feeling lonely, unsafe and unloved.
The term “child welfare” makes it sound like our government is meant to take care of us, but what we endured was anything but protection. Too often, young people like us feel like just another number, without the love and support children need to grow and prosper.
We are working to change that. Earlier this summer, we traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend a Senate Finance Committee hearing on youth residential treatment facilities and speak with lawmakers about our experience with the failing system as they assess possible solutions.
Youth who age out of the foster care system face a higher chance of dropping out of school, suffering from substance use disorder and alcoholism, and being incarcerated. Many continue to be haunted by what we have endured, carrying those traumas with us for the rest of our lives.
This situation doesn’t need to be handed down to the next generation. By reallocating funds, we can proactively explore alternative solutions focused on family preservation and support. This approach aims to keep families united, making the removal of children a last resort.
This can start with ending the use of expensive institutions to place children in the system. Every effort must be made to find them homes, whenever possible with family members. Children who live with kin confront less trauma and anxiety than those in the foster system. Familial care can also help young people hold on to their sense of identity and belonging to their communities. Research shows that they will have improved behavioral and social outcomes, healthier sibling bonds, better educational outcomes and economic stability, as well as a smoother transition into adulthood.
We were impressed that the Finance Committee centered its findings around youth representatives, lived experts, and community advocates who have directly experienced the harms of institutionalization — and must be included when developing any meaningful solutions. We were proud to collaborate alongside dozens of other youth advocates — in partnership with Children’s Rights and New Tomorrow — on the Are You Listening? report, which utilizes first-hand experiences to develop solutions to de-institutionalize the foster system, including by improving community resources to help ensure families can stay together. We are also driven by our work with fellow lived-experts on an educational campaign, which grew out of the report, to expose the reality of institutionalization.
But we must go beyond attempts to make institutions better. We have to eliminate these harmful placements altogether. We cannot continue to tear families apart and create further generations of traumatized children who grow into traumatized adults. No child deserves to suffer from the mental, physical, and emotional abuse and neglect that we experienced in these facilities. As the committee said, this is taxpayer-funded child abuse.
We commend the committee for its work, but it does not end there. We call on Congress to stop separating families unnecessarily, depopulate existing institutional facilities, and use Medicaid and other federal and state resources to build community support for the families that need it the most. Keeping families together and supporting initiatives centered around kinship care must be the priority. We share an inextricable traumatic bond that has motivated us to change this system for other young people, and the moment for change is now.
