Children need continuous, personalized care.
 | By Sarah Wildman Staff Editor, Opinion |
When Sixto Cancel was one month shy of a year old he was taken from his biological mother's home and placed into foster care. His mother, battling addiction and poverty, had him under her roof only at one other brief moment, when Cancel was 6. His childhood was a blur of changing foster parents — with one six-year stint in an adoptive home he describes as abusive, starting at age 9. |
As a teen, Cancel resisted being placed in a group home, having witnessed his brother's experience in one. He stayed in the foster care system until he aged out at age 23. It wasn't until he was free of the system entirely that he learned there was a constellation of kin — aunts and uncles — who might have taken him in, had the authorities only known, or perhaps cared, to look for them. |
Cancel has since channeled his frustration over the failings he experienced as a child into Think of Us, a nonprofit organization pushing local, state and federal governments to do more for children who have been placed into the care of the state. More than half of the staff are former foster children or have had a proximate experience — as an adoptive parent or sibling of a foster child. |
"My foster care placements failed not because I didn't belong in a family," Cancel writes in his moving essay, "but because the system failed to identify kinship placements for me and lacked enough culturally competent, community-based services to keep me in a home that had a chance at success." |
Cancel argues for several specific changes to the current foster care system. They all begin with changing views around poverty, which he argues should not be a cause for removing a child from his or her family. Instead, the authorities should focus on cases of neglect and abuse. If a child needs care, Cancel writes, the priority should be kin placement first, with an emphasis on an expansive definition of kin that includes adult caregivers, former step parents and others who already know a child well. Foster parents should be a last resort. And group homes, or institutions, he argues, are almost never the answer. |
The National Foster Youth Institute estimates some 20 percent of youth who age out of the foster care system — usually at age 18 or 21 years old depending on the state — will experience homelessness immediately. Many will have run-ins with the law, especially the men. |
"This is a systemic issue that really needs changing," Cancel said to me. |
"What I would love to see," he said, "is requiring states to provide the same type of stipend, the same type of services, that we would provide strangers who take in young people to kinship families." |
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