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Paying Foster Parents Should your foster parents get more money to take care of you? Some people think so, and they’re trying to make it happen. Recently, an advocacy group called Children’s Rights, together with the National Foster Parents Association and the University of Maryland School of Social Work, put out a report urging states to rethink how they pay their foster parents. Researchers calculated how much money they thought each state should provide, based on how much the typical middle-class household spends on a child. They found out that in some states, rates are half of what they determined it really costs to take care of a child. For instance, New York pays parents $504 a month to care for a two-year-old. But according to the report’s guidelines, they should be paying $721, a 43% increase. In almost every state the report recommends giving more money to the foster parents to provide for children. On one hand, I think this idea makes sense, because it takes a lot of money to care for a child. But on the other hand, it’s hard to know if parents will really use the money for their foster children. A lot of kids in care have experiences with foster parents who don’t seem to care about them at all, and are just taking them in to get a little extra income. I think some foster parents do take in kids for the money, and some don’t. But how can you tell the difference? If, with the current rates, foster parents have to spend some money out of their pockets, I think that’s OK, because it shows they really care for the child. Some advocates say that people are discouraged from being foster parents because they don’t get enough money to care for the kids. But I think higher payments might lure in the wrong kind of parents, the ones who are just concerned about the money. Before states start spending more money on foster care payments, I think they need to do a better job of making sure that children are actually being taken care of with the money that foster parents already recieve. —La’Quesha Barner
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About
our books Stories from Represent have been anthologized in several books by Youth Communication. The Heart Knows Something Different (Persea Books, 1996) is a collection of personal essays first published in FCYU; in addition, The Struggle to Be Strong: True Stories By Teens About Resilience (Free Spirit, 2000), Things Get Hectic: Teens Write About the Violence That Surrounds Them (Simon & Schuster, 1998) and Out With It: Gay and Straight Teens Write About Homosexuality (Youth Communication, 1996) feature stories from Represent, as well as from New Youth Connections (NYC), our other teen-written magazine. |
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