1,200 teens age out of foster care in Ohio each year

Editorial: A better send-off for foster care kids
Cincinnati Enquirer, Sept. 16, 2007.

It's the age of helicopter parents, who hover over maturing offspring, and boomerang kids, who graduate from college and then move back home.

In that context, it's hard to imagine the utter aloneness of the 24,000 teenagers who age out of the foster care system each year with nowhere to go and no one to go to.

No one begs these kids to come home for Thanksgiving.

No one chides them for blowing their spare change on Starbucks coffee.

And no one nags them about deciding which colleges to visit or writing Grandma a thank-you note for the birthday gift.

For most of these teens, there is no car, Grandma or home.

EASILY OVERLOOKED
Our area knows well the tragedy of a child who dies in the foster care system but almost nothing about the teenager who survives it only to be kicked out at 18. The first child is an anomaly, with less than 1 percent of children dying in foster care in most years. The second, among teen foster youth, is the norm.

Initially, these youth are easily overlooked. They are notoriously disconnected from family, neighborhoods and activities and, because of their traumatized pasts, gun-shy about committing to anything or anyone.

But within months of emancipating from the system, they turn up in very public ways - in homeless shelters, on public assistance rolls and in jails. Often, they are victims of their own youthful naiveté or impulsiveness. But the scrapes that typical teenagers are rescued from turn into serious trouble - eviction notices, ruined credit, police charges - for these youths.

Hamilton County has one of the nation's most progressive programs for emancipating youth in its Lighthouse Independent Living program. It prepares them to live on their own, sets them up in their own apartment and, if they're responsible, provides them with furnishings, a nest egg and a good start in life.

But effective as it is, the Lighthouse program is only a substitute for what they need desperately: a permanent family.

One thing that prevents them from finding that family is a funding formula that pays for foster care but not for assistance for relatives who could become guardians. Sending more federal and state dollars to guardians or to efforts to locate extended family would reduce the number of teens who age out alone.

VALUE OF PREVENTION
Even better is targeting funding to keeping children out of foster care in the first place. Those efforts include parenting classes, counseling, anger and stress management, and substance abuse programs.

Most years, more than 1,200 teenagers age out in Ohio and 500 in Kentucky. To turn the odds in their favor we must root them in a family, or help them to establish a home for themselves.