Foster Care Is Not a Shell Game — It’s a Lifeline That Must Be Fixed

I spent nearly two years in the foster care system. Long enough to know that while the system is meant to protect children, too often it ends up moving them around like pieces in a shell game—never settled, never safe, never certain of what comes next.

Being bounced from home-to-home leaves marks that don’t show up on paperwork. It creates trauma, instability, and a constant sense of waiting for the floor to drop out again. Children in foster care don’t just lose their homes—they lose predictability, trust, and the feeling that anyone is truly responsible for their safety. Even when foster families try their best, constant movement does damage. Stability is not a luxury for children; it is a necessity.

What made my experience worse—and what still happens far too often—is that I was eventually returned to a home that had no business regaining custody. A home marked by violence and abuse. Reunification is supposed to be the goal of the foster care system, and in principle, that makes sense. Families should be preserved when it is safe to do so. But reunification without rigorous vetting is not compassion—it’s negligence.

Once a child is removed from a home for abuse or neglect, the bar for returning that child must be high, clear, and enforced. Promises, short-term compliance, or surface-level improvements are not enough. A child’s safety cannot hinge on optimism or pressure to close a case. The system must be absolutely certain that the environment a child is being sent back into is safe—not just on paper, but in reality.

And the responsibility does not end the day a child is returned home.

There must be mandatory, periodic follow-ups with a case worker, conducted privately and without parents present. Full stop. Children need a safe space to speak honestly—without fear of punishment or retaliation. If a child has already been harmed once, the system has a moral obligation to ensure it does not happen again. Ongoing oversight is not interference; it is accountability.

We also need clearer, more realistic pathways to adoption. Too many children linger in limbo because the system is more focused on process than outcomes. Adoption should not be an afterthought or an obstacle course. It should be a supported, transparent option when reunification is not safe or appropriate. Permanency matters. Children deserve to know where they belong.

Foster care should not feel like a holding pattern until the system decides what’s easiest. It should be a bridge to safety, stability, and a real future. That requires better vetting, better oversight, and the courage to admit when returning a child home is not the right answer.

I am not speaking about this from theory or statistics. I am speaking as someone who lived it.

Fixing foster care means putting children—not timelines, not quotas, not adult convenience—at the center of every decision. It means recognizing that once the state intervenes in a child’s life, it takes on a profound responsibility: not just to act, but to follow through.

Children are not case numbers. They are lives. And they deserve better than a system that rolls the dice and hopes for the best.