Foster Care as a Failed Experiment: Why We Must Transform America’s System This Child Abuse Prevention Month

By Howard Talenfeld

April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month—a time to reflect on how we protect our most vulnerable children. But what happens when the system designed to protect them becomes a source of harm?

For over fifty years, America’s foster care systems have promised one thing: safety, stability, and a chance for a better family life. They remove hundreds of thousands of children annually from abusive and neglectful homes—a necessary intervention when families fail their children. Yet behind the closed doors of state and local systems, cloaked in confidentiality, tens of thousands of children have suffered abuse, trauma, and permanent abandonment—not from their original families, but even more tragically, from the very institutions created to rescue them.

This is not a story about isolated failures or individual bad actors. This is the story of a broken system.

The Evidence of Systemic Failure

The numbers tell a stark story. Twenty-nine states currently face class action lawsuits challenging systematic violations of children’s basic rights to safety, stability, and well-being. The vast majority of these suits have resulted in consent decrees—state admissions of liability that their child protection systems are failing children. If anything, the states that have avoided lawsuits may not be operating significantly better systems; they simply haven’t been held accountable in court.

Since the late 1990s, when there were only 24 pending class actions, the number has grown to 29 states. This trajectory shows a system in crisis, not improvement.

Beyond the courtroom, the evidence accumulates in tragedy:

• Tens of thousands of children across the United States are physically, sexually, and emotionally abused by the foster care systems themselves each year.
• Nearly half of youth who “age out” of foster care, between 15,000-20,000 children annually, never receive a permanent family and become homeless within two years.
• By age 24, fewer than half are employed.
• Many end up in correctional facilities, homeless shelters, and mental hospitals—predictable outcomes when children grow up without committed relationships and face successive, destabilizing traumas.

These are not isolated data points. They are the inevitable examples of human tragedy, which are the result of a system that treats children as cases to manage rather than human beings who urgently need families.

From Orphanages to a Holding Pattern

How did we get here? America’s foster care system evolved from a well-intentioned reform of traditional orphanages and almshouses. It was supposed to be better—and in theory, it was. But somewhere along the way, the urgency of the mission was fundamentally lost. What has emerged is not a system designed to reunify children with their families or secure them in permanent homes. Instead, it became a bureaucratic holding pattern: temporary placements following temporary placements for so many children, without the therapeutic support or family commitment these children desperately need.

The confidentiality that was meant to protect children has instead allowed systemic failures to persist for the individual children abused by the system itself, and to do so completely hidden from public view. Limited data, scattered press coverage, and mounting class action lawsuits offer only glimpses of what is the tip of a much larger iceberg.

What This Means for Child Abuse Prevention

As we observe National Child Abuse Prevention Month this April, we must confront an uncomfortable truth: preventing child abuse means more than removing children from dangerous homes. It means creating systems that actually protect them—systems that provide permanent families, therapeutic support, and genuine stability.

The current foster care system fails on this fundamental measure. It is conducting a decades-long experiment on America’s most vulnerable children, and the experiment is categorically failing them.

A Call for Transformation

We cannot accept this as inevitable. Despite billions of taxpayer dollars invested in foster care, we have built a system that far too often injures the children it was created to protect. This month, as we recommit ourselves to child abuse prevention, we must also recommit ourselves to systemic change.

The path forward requires honest acknowledgment of what the current system is and what it is not. It is not protecting children. It is not ensuring permanence. It is not providing the family relationships that are a basic human right for every child.

Real prevention—real protection—demands that we transform America’s child protection systems into ones that set a more realistic and fundamentally human goal: ensuring that every child has a family and a champion who will fight to make that happen. Not a series of placements. Not a bureaucratic case file. A family, and the legal representation needed to protect that right. A first basic step is to ensure that every child has an attorney who is personally responsible for their safety, therapeutic support and guiding them home or to a family that can support them.

This April, during National Child Abuse Prevention Month, let’s commit to more than preventing abuse. Let’s commit to giving every child a voice. Let’s commit to building systems worthy of the children they serve.