Beyond The Foster Care System: The Future for Teens

Chapter 5: Preparing for Independent Living

Through working with teens like Carlos, Jenny, Xaranda, and others, we began to see that the system’s greatest failure was not that it sometimes mistreated teens, but that it failed to prepare teens for either college or employment. The system consistently failed to provide teens with meaningful skills to succeed as adults. Throughout our work representing teens in the legal system , educating child welfare professionals, teaching teens about their rights, or organizing youth to advocate for policy changes, we kept coming back to this central problem—too many teens failed after foster care. During this period at Youth Advocacy Center, we observed that even kids who appeared to be doing well in foster care struggled once they left the system. The foster care bureaucracy clearly was designed not for teens, but for the temporary protection of infants and small children at risk of abuse or neglect . It was not intended to raise adolescents to adulthood. Policies and practices that served short-term goals, primarily daily maintenance and behavior supervision, were not suitable for managing the lives of tens of thousands of teens in the system for extended periods of time. By law, the system was supposed to prepare teens for something called independent living. The federal and state governments passed wellintentioned laws, meant to remedy the problem of foster care teens becoming homeless and welfare dependent. However, these laws and policies had not translated into successful programs,1 as we judged from the 108 5 Preparing for Independent Living Leonard numbers of teens who were still leaving foster care without a place to live, a way to support themselves, or a set of relationships with people in the community who could help them. In New York, foster care agencies were required to offer teens a total of sixteen hours per year of independent living training. This provided a total of two days, only one half percent of a year in foster care, which reflected the low priority this was given by the foster care system. Through our work we saw that many dedicated professionals in the foster care programs received inadequate training and supervision to provide consistent and meaningful programs to prepare teens for independence. Administrators and policy makers supported present independent living programs as a mandated responsibility, but rarely as a priority or with conviction that such services could produce significant results. We didn’t know what caused this lack of support: was there an underlying belief that foster care teens were destined to a dependent life no matter what help they received? Or did promoting safety, managing behavior, and finding suitable foster homes simply overwhelm all other initiatives? We began to focus on the independent living policies and programming as an area that needed change. If we could offer a new concept and effective model of preparing teens for successful independence, then we could help individual teens and simultaneously demonstrate to the system that it could prepare teens for lasting independence. Betsy We first met Leonard at one of these independent living workshops, where Jenny and I were presenting a rights and advocacy program. Carly Nostrand, the independent living worker at Leonard’s agency, invited us to present after her workshop on finding a job. Paul and I respected Carly’s commitment to teens and her desire to see them succeed after foster care. We had become acquainted when she attended meetings we ran for foster care agency staff to learn about our work. Carly was in her early forties, mature, and funny. She empathized with the teens. She had shared with us that she was in foster care as a child and relished the opportunity to help teens who are “going through what I’ve gone through.” 109 Preparing for Independent Living Carly expressed frustration with all the impediments in her way as she tried to prepare teens for independence. She was charged with ensuring that none of the one hundred or more teens at her agency aged out to homelessness . The agency focused on preventing negative outcomes rather than supporting positive outcomes, such as initiating a career or pursuing additional education or training. Teens picked up the nuance of the agency’s focus, and it added to their sense of discouragement and self-defeat. Carly felt she was competing against the agency’s other priorities—continuing crises, doubling up on staffing responsibilities given problems in attracting and retaining qualified...