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Foster care changes provide safety net for young adults
Robin Behrens hopes to see more of her foster children succeed after they leave her home.
A new provision could help.
Gov. Jay Nixon recently signed Senate Bill 205, which allows young adults who age out of foster care at age 18 to re-enter the system before they turn 21. They must be in foster care at 18 in order to take advantage of the re-entry clause.
According to the most recent counts, 11,607 Missouri children and young adults are in the foster care system.
Before the bill, young adults who had trouble once they were out of the system didn’t have resources to help them.
“In a lot of ways they were out of luck,” said Lori Ross, president of Midwest Foster Care and Adoption in Kansas City. “They would have been out there struggling, trying to figure things out without formalized support of any kind.”
Foster families would have had no financial resources to help offset the costs of trying to help the young adults, which they do now under the new bill.
Ms. Behrens of Grant City, Mo., has been fostering children since the early 1990s. She’s seen how rough the transition from dependent to independent can be.
One of her foster daughters recently chose to leave the system and is struggling. There’s not much Ms. Behrens can do to help, because at 18, her foster care daughter is legally an adult.
Ms. Behrens doesn’t think she’s quite there yet.
“She’s not an adult in her mind. The way she works and thinks is very immature,” she said of her former foster care daughter.
Eighteen carries a lot of weight in the foster care system. It’s the age children are told they can leave. It’s the age they have a say in their mental-health therapy, have a say if their foster parents participate in their therapy with them.
Complicating the issue of independence is mental-health care.
Many of the children Ms. Behrens fosters need treatment for psychological conditions. They need reminders to take their medication. Without assistance, pill schedules can be thrown off.
Missing one pill can be minor, but missing two can turn into a slippery slope, Ms. Behrens said. They may not notice that without medication, their behavior becomes more irrational.
Ms. Behrens would like the maximum age to be in foster care to be raised even further to give the young adults time to get used to taking their medicine on their own.
In the past, Ms. Behrens tried to be as available as she could to the young adults who have left her care. They don’t always ask for her support, even if it looks like they need it, she said.
“When they make mistakes, it’s almost like they feel they’re going to let us down or something by coming in and asking for help,” she said.
The bill offers a solution to that problem. It allows the Children’s Division of the Missouri Department of Social Services, the court or the foster parents to have a say in if the 18-year-old could benefit from re-entering the system.
Nevertheless, the bill may not be well-received all around, cautions Lavell Rucker, a social worker for the St. Joseph School District.
“One challenge will be those who are not wanting to return to foster care due to peer pressure,” she said in an e-mail to the News-Press.
Ms. Behrens also sees education about the bill being an issue. She imagines that many who have aged out of the foster care system don’t know the bill passed and that these services are available.
She’ll be doing her best to let the children she’s fostered understand their options.
News item
Jennifer Gordon
http://www.newspressnow.com/news/local_news/article_b89ca01e-6e94-5c88-8fac-f4803deb7471.html
