The mark of a good system is not how many youth it serves but its ability to take in brokenness and produce wholeness. The child welfare system in America is one solution to a million problems. It is a mechanism and machine that thrives off of fragmented families. The ultimate intention of the foster care system is not reunification. When removing a child from a home, this machine is taking on the parental role saying, “we are going to step in and do this better.” But like an absent parent, they too fail to keep their promises. What happens when families are in a worse state than how we found them? Who is the guard for the lost children? Who keeps in check this machine that was made to be a check? Who keeps the score?
The youth do.
The impacts of a failing system only falls on the youth it fails to serve. When the system sets out to repair something it broke, it is not a favor. It’s its responsibility. Yet, youth in care take the brunt of the system’s negligence and the solitude of our silence. Holding government agencies accountable is not a radical notion — it’s the bare minimum. Every time we don’t speak up about clear injustices, abuses of power and grievances, we trade in short-term discomfort for long-term dysfunction. There are questions to be raised and norms to be challenged. For instance, why are Black and brown youth taken from their homes quicker and have longer stays in care? Why aren’t staff trained in trauma-informed care? Why do foster youth make up a bulk of the homelessness population? Who is to blame when the structure fails, and who takes responsibility? Who picks up the debris, and who is keeping the score?
Current and former foster youth in care have, for decades, been praised for their resilience but villainized for their truths. They don’t want us to be adults but don’t allow us to be children. They label us strong, so they can ignore our weaknesses. They want to uplift our voices in public but diminish them in private. They use our stories in rooms we are not welcome in. It is tiring being both the person who needs saving and also the savior. We not only have to survive this system, but now we have to mend it to make it better, to make it equitable and to make it sustainable for the next generation.
We have kept the score. We have hid the scars, and we have kept the peace. Systemic changes don’t happen overnight and over coffee. They are seeds from an outcry, birthed in transition and born in the hearts of the passionate. Every youth that has crossed into child welfare has kept the score, and it isn’t adding up. A system can’t claim to be a solution and produce problems. A system can’t claim to be a safe haven and fail to keep youth safe. You can’t be a refuge for the abandoned and abused, yet go on to abuse and then abandon. You can’t be both heaven and hell. The cost is too high, and the youth and their families are the ones who pay for it.
