Supporting Foster Families in Your Youth Program

Kids Who Carry More: What Foster Care Month Means for Your Organization

May is National Foster Care Month. For administrators and direct-service staff of youth-serving organizations, it is worth treating this observance as something more than a social media post. It is an invitation to ask a practical question: does your organization understand the foster care experience well enough to actually serve these young people? And if the honest answer is not fully — what would you do differently if it were?

Before we get into the research and the practical guidance, realize the young people we are talking about are probably already in your program. Not might be. Already are. They are in your after-school cohort, on your sports teams, at your summer camp, in your faith community’s youth group. They showed up this week. They may show up again tomorrow. And unless your staff understand what they are carrying, your organization is likely responding to those children in ways that miss the mark — even when your people are trying hard.

I have spent years working at the intersection of child protection law and organizational practice. I have also spent years as a foster parent. The good news is that you do not have to be a clinician, a caseworker, or a specialist to make a meaningful difference in the life of a foster youth in your program. You do have to understand what you are dealing with.

The Scale of What You Are Already Serving

According to the most recent federal data, 328,947 children were in the U.S. foster care system as of September 30, 2024. That number has declined from a peak of 437,000 in 2017, but it still represents hundreds of thousands of children in every state, most of them school-aged, most of them actively enrolled in programs like yours.

People routinely underestimate how many foster youth are in community programs precisely because foster youth often conceal their status. They have good reasons to. Disclosure can lead to stigma, awkward questions, and the very unwanted attention most kids in difficult circumstances spend enormous energy avoiding. So, your staff may not know who they are working with.

What your staff do know — or should know — is that according to recent research, approximately 90 percent of children in foster care have experienced at least one traumatic event and nearly half have experienced four or more distinct types of trauma. The behavioral signatures of that trauma show up in your program whether or not you have identified the child as a foster youth. The child who constantly tests limits, the one who shuts down at transitions, the one whose emotional reactions seem wildly out of proportion to what just happened — these children may be exhibiting classic trauma symptoms.

The question Foster Care Month invites is whether your organization is structured to respond to those children effectively, or whether your current approach inadvertently makes things worse.

Why the Foster Care Experience Produces These Patterns

Before I talk about what your organization can do, I want to make sure your staff understand why these patterns exist. I’m not arguing for explaining away behavior. I’m urging that we read behavior accurately — which is the prerequisite for responding effectively.

Most children enter foster care not because of dramatic, visible abuse, but because of neglect. Federal data for 2024 shows neglect accounts for 55 percent of removals, parental drug or alcohol use for 31 percent, and physical abuse for 13 percent. The families behind these children are often struggling with poverty, addiction, mental illness, and domestic violence — not malice. That distinction matters for how your staff perceive and talk about the families of foster youth in your program.

The data also shows entering foster care is itself traumatic, separate from the conditions that caused removal. Children are typically removed without warning. They often have no opportunity to say goodbye to siblings, friends, neighbors, or teachers. Every element of the familiar world — the smells, the routines, the school, the neighborhood — disappears, often within hours. The American Bar Association compiled research on the experience of removal. It describes the day of placement as constituting a crisis for children in which everything in their lives changes simultaneously, and they are overwhelmed with feelings of abandonment, rejection, worthlessness, guilt, and helplessness.

And then — for many children — it happens again. Children in foster care average multiple placements before aging out or achieving permanency. Each placement means a new school, new adults, new rules, new peers, and a new calculation about whether trust is safe this time. The behavioral patterns your staff see — hypervigilance, difficulty with transitions, testing relationships, emotional reactivity, withdrawal — are the predictable, adaptive responses of children who have learned that adults disappear and environments change without warning.

Knowing this does not require your staff to become therapists. It requires them to stop interpreting trauma responses as character defects.

What Your Organization Is Actually Providing — Whether You Know It or Not

Here is the finding from the protective factors research that is important for administrators and program directors to know: youth-adult connectedness is one of the strongest and most consistent protective factors for adolescent health and wellbeing. Strong, positive relationships with parents, family members, teachers, school staff, and — critically — other caring adults in the community protect adolescents from a range of poor health outcomes and promote positive development.

Your program staff are those caring adults. A coach who shows up every Tuesday. A program director who knows a child’s name. An after-school coordinator who notices when someone is absent and follows up. This is not soft or supplementary work. Safe, stable, and nurturing relationships — including with caring adults outside the family — are a primary prevention strategy for the long-term consequences of maltreatment. Your staff, without any special training or clinical credential, can function as that relationship.

The Program Design Questions That Follow

If you want to serve the foster kids in your program, here are some questions you should be asking about your programs. These are not checklist items — they are diagnostic questions that surface whether your organization is structured to actually deliver on what the protective factors evidence says works.

Are your staff trained to read trauma responses as communication rather than defiance? Most staff working in youth programs have not received training in this area. They are interpreting what they see through a behavioral lens — this child is disrespectful, this child is lazy, this child is difficult. That interpretation is frequently wrong, and it leads to responses that compound harm rather than interrupt it. Training staff to recognize the signatures of trauma exposure — and to respond with consistency rather than escalation — is a concrete, achievable organizational investment.

Does your program protect the continuity of trusted staff relationships? Staff turnover in youth-serving organizations runs as high as 40 percent per year. For a foster youth who has experienced the sudden, unexplained loss of every adult relationship in their life, a program that arbitrarily reassigns staff or cycles through volunteers is not neutral. It is re-traumatizing. Intentional staff continuity — treating it as a program quality issue, not just an HR issue — is one of the most concrete things an administrator can do.

Do your program activities assume stable family structures? Family tree projects, Mother’s Day cards, “bring a parent” events, and icebreakers that invite youth to share where they live and who their family is — these are common program elements that can be genuinely painful for foster youth. This is not about eliminating every family-related activity. It is about designing with awareness, offering alternatives without singling anyone out, and making sure your staff know how to navigate these moments.

Does your organization protect the privacy of foster youth? Most children and youth in foster care do not want their foster status shared with others. Staff who disclose a child’s status to other participants, discuss it with colleagues who don’t need the information, or post photos of foster youth on social media are violating both legal protections and a fundamental duty to that child. This needs to be explicit policy, not assumed common sense.

What This Month Is For

National Foster Care Month is not primarily about awareness campaigns. It is a useful occasion to do something your organization probably doesn’t do often enough: take a direct look at whether your programs are actually serving the most vulnerable young people in them.

This post opens our May blog series on supporting foster youth in youth programs. The posts that follow go deeper on specific areas: what trauma responses look like in program settings and how to respond, how to introduce youth to trades and career pathways as a protective factor against the economic precarity that follows aging out, what the research says about staff as protective factors and how to build programs that leverage that, confidentiality obligations your staff may not fully understand, mentoring structures that work, and what aging out actually means — and what your organization can do before that cliff arrives.

Sources

Administration for Children and Families. Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS). https://acf.gov/cb/research-data-technology/statistics-research/afcars

American Bar Association. “The Effects of Removal into Foster Care.” Compiled memorandum on child separation research. https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/litigation_committees/childrights/child-separation-memo/effects-of-removal-from-foster-care-generally.pdf

Casey Family Programs. “Placement Stability Impacts.” https://www.casey.org/placement-stability-impacts/

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Essentials for Childhood Framework: Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention.” https://www.cdc.gov/child-abuse-neglect/prevention/index.html

Christian Alliance for Orphans. “U.S. Foster Care Statistics.” CAFO Foster Care Statistics. https://cafo.org/foster-care-statistics/

Fratto, Carolyn M. “Trauma-Informed Care for Youth in Foster Care.” Archives of Psychiatric Nursing 30, no. 3 (2016): 439–446. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27256954/

Search Institute. “Developmental Assets Framework.” https://searchinstitute.org/resources-hub/developmental-assets-framework

Sieving, Renee E., et al. “Youth–Adult Connectedness: A Key Protective Factor for Adolescent Health.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 52, no. 3 (2017): S275–S278. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5559097/

Texas Children’s Commission. “Information Sharing between Child Welfare and Schools: Maintaining Privacy and Confidentiality.” 2017. https://www.texaschildrenscommission.gov/media/snqahngu/confidentiality-guide-fall-2017-final.pdf