Foster Care
Foster care is a temporary arrangement for children who cannot live safely with their birth family. Parents with children in foster care are legally entitled to services to help them parent their children safely. In New York State, 53% of children in foster care returned to their parents in 2008. If a parent is still unable to care for their child after 15 of the last 22 months that the child is in foster care, the agency or county that has legal custody for the child must move to terminate the parent's legal rights to free the child for adoption.
This section has information about how to become a foster parent; building shared parenting relationships between foster parents, birth families and agencies; financial supports for families; and legal issues that foster parents might face.
Additional resources:
- Foster Care Reading List
- Embracing Respectful Language
- Foster Parent Training In America by Sarah Gerstenzang (pdf)
- How the Child Welfare System Works (pdf)
- The Long Way Home: A Study of Children Stranded in NYC Foster Care
