Foster Care, U.S.

Foster care typically refers to care for children provided in a state-authorized system of licensed homes or other out-of-family environments. The term may be used as equivalent to foster family care or temporary care in family homes by licensed foster care providers who are probably not related to the child. However, kinship care arrangements that are authorized, supervised, and usually subsidized by the state (sometimes only through food stamps and access to Medicaid) are also a very common form of foster care today, as are group home environments. At times collectively referred to as dependent children, to distinguish them from delinquent children (a distinction that has historically been racialized in the U.S. context), foster children today have often been forcibly removed from their biological parents ...