The Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) has a body of research conducted throughout the U.S. that corroborates the recent findings of the study of six orphanages in Bucharest, Romania — children placed in supportive and loving foster homes have much better outcomes than children living in orphanages. By all accounts, an institutionalized living environment does not provide the kind of individualized and loving caregiving that children need for healthy growth and development.
Thousands of America’s children have to live in our nation’s foster care system for their own safety and well-being. In our current foster care system, the outcomes for many children in care are far from optimal because there is a critical shortage of appropriate foster parents in many communities throughout the United States to meet the growing need for family-based foster care. In an effort to improve outcomes, CWLA has developed a range of resources to assist its member agencies in recruiting and supporting prospective foster parents. Among those resources is the Pride Training Curriculum, a comprehensive approach to recruitment, family assessment, and pre-service training so that prospective foster families have an opportunity to learn and practice the knowledge, skills and abilities they will need as new foster parents and potential adoptive parents.
CWLA and its membership base of more than 600 agencies are also actively engaged in advocacy efforts to bring about systematic reform in our nation’s child welfare system. One major effort is CWLA’s national campaign calling on the Obama Administration to re-inaugurate the White House Conference for Children and Youth. The conference held every ten years after it was first established in 1909 has not been convened since 1970. Now, three decades have passed without the White House convening a conference to examine the state of our nation’s rapidly growing population of vulnerable children and establish national goals for improvement during this decade.
Without a doubt, quality care in a stable, safe and supportive environment is the key goal of foster care—ideally with a family member. Therefore, child welfare advocacy organizations, policymakers, providers and practitioners alike have to collectively champion the imperative need for services and supports to significantly improve the life experiences of children in foster care.
Reader Comments
Back to article
Christine James-Brown of VA 4:31PM April 19, 2010