Foster Care System: Children without families
SOC 331: Social Justice and Ethics
Bernie Colon
November 14, 2011

Raising children is one of the most important responsibilities in any society. Today, working parents have many options, but what about those children who have neither a mother nor father? What about those children who come from broken and abusive homes? In such cases there are often few choices. Parentless children may be placed in orphanages or in foster homes. Ideally, foster care offers children more personalized attention than would normally be available at a public or private situation. However, orphanage care is notoriously uneven. While some children are indeed in loving homes, others find themselves neglected or …show more content…

By removing youngsters from city streets and placing them in farm families, he thought they would have a chance of escaping a lifetime of suffering. He proposed that these children be sent by train to live and work on farms in the Midwest and West. The resulting Orphan Train Movement lasted from 1853 to the early 1900s, and transported more than 120,000 children to new lives. In the early 1990s, Children's Aid pioneered Concurrent Planning, a foster care approach that became the basis for the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, and which greatly changed foster care. Through Concurrent Planning, Children’s Aid works simultaneously with birth parents and foster parents to achieve permanency for children as quickly as possible. Our first priority is to return children safely to their own families. If that proves impossible, however, we make sure that foster families are prepared to adopt them. “Our approach works: 90 percent of the children we serve who are not reunified with their birth families are adopted by their foster families. For the remaining 10 percent, we find loving homes through our Adoption Program” (Children’s Aid Society).
Mission Statement of Foster Care Systems, Non-Profit Organizations
“Child Placement and Supportive Services: The mission of CPSS is to provide safe, permanent and nurturing families within