Foster Parenting 101

As for race and heritage, no one race dominates at a national level, as you can see in the data below. Furthermore, the racial make-up of children in the foster care system often varies region-to-region.

That said, these numbers likely won’t reflect the local population demographics. In many areas, families of some races are more likely to be involved in the foster care system, which may reflect an underlying bias of mandatory reporters, law enforcement, social workers and judges. As you can see from the data below, in some circumstances families of color are disproportionately represented in the child welfare system.

Just as foster care systems are made up of a variety of races, many foster parents won’t be the same race as the child. As we’ll show in a future lesson, foster parents can practice approaches like “cultural socialization” and “preparation for bias” training to bridge gaps.

Another factor to consider is whether you’re comfortable welcoming siblings into your home. While this may require more effort and resources than fostering a single child, there’s compelling data that children in foster care do better when living with a sibling.

Below is retrospective data on teacher perceptions of 1,700 children in foster care, divided between whether siblings were “split” (all lived separately), “splintered” (some siblings remained together) or “together” (all siblings lived together). Teachers were 40% more likely to have a positive perception of children in foster care who lived with their siblings than children separated from their siblings.

The same dataset showed that foster parents regard their children in foster care as “being more a part of this family” when siblings were kept together. A team from the University of Texas noticed a related phenomenon in their study of over 23,000 children in foster care: children separated from their siblings were nearly twice as likely to eventually be “displaced” or removed from their foster home.