I'm Jordan Christian Fredrickson and this is my foster care story. At the time of this printing, I am 14 years old. I was born in California to a single mom. We moved to Chicago, and on to Atlanta by the time I was six. My birth mom was seldom home. I have little memory of her. My oldest sister, just a teenager herself, was the one sibling who did her best to raise me. The few memories I have of “pre-foster care life” with my siblings are pretty good. I really can’t remember much because I was so young.
When I was seven, I had just arrived home from school and was playing the Xbox. I heard a knock at the side door. It was the police. My birth mom came down to the station, and that’s when she was arrested. About a month later, we moved to a smaller apartment. Over the next few months, one by one, all of my siblings began to leave until it was just me and my older sister who was still only in high school. Sometime later, she told me that I was going to spend the night with one of my brothers at a home. When I arrived, he was not there. She told me he would be back soon and that she would see me soon, but he never came. She didn’t return until several weeks later. These weeks were spent in a room by myself; I was not allowed to play outside, I couldn’t be in the living room with the foster parent, and I had nothing to do but think. I was only seven years old. I had been abandoned and lied to by my family. I felt unwanted. I felt like I was unimportant to everyone around me.
When I left that home, I went to where my brother was at police officer’s home. He left a few months later. I lived there for about a year. It was around this time that I realized I was in foster care. In this home, there was a foster mom, a foster dad, and birth children: a 7-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl. The foster dad treated me horribly. I was always scared of him. He would cuss and yell at me and never seemed to care. The foster mom was just like him.
The two kids never wanted anything to do with me. Once again, I was unimportant to everyone around me.
For today’s children in foster care in America, it is a often a heartbreaking struggle. Each day brings with it challenges and emotional burdens that are difficult to overcome. Today, there is hope. Today, there is a book that will help in this struggle. Fostering Hope for America is designed to bring aid to children in foster care in today’s world.
Abused. Beaten. Neglected. Starved. Abandoned. Children living in fear. Children in need. Children placed into foster care. At any given day, there are over 500,000 children placed in foster care in the United States. Each of these children has suffered immeasurable hurt, unimaginative pain, and unspeakable horrors from those who were supposed to love them the most. To be sure, the life of a child in foster care has been one of great pain and tremendous suffering. For many of these children, a stable home and a loving family is all they crave, yet never truly find. More often than not, these children in care never truly recover from the emotional, physical, and psychological wounds that they suffer from.
Life after foster care can also be one of tragedy, as well. Each year, between 20,000 to 25,000 foster children age out of the foster care system and attempt to begin life on their own. Of those 500,000 children in care, this is a large number and disturbing percentage. For many foster children, foster care is a temporary service before returning home to a parent, moving in with a biological family member, or even beginning a new life in an adoptive home. However, for thousands who do not find reunification with family in their lives, reaching 18 years of age can be a tremendously frightening experience. For others, 21 is the year where these children in need may find themselves no longer part of the foster cares system, depending upon the state the foster children reside in.
Sadly, other numbers are just as disturbing. 65% of children in foster care drop out of high school. 6% go to college, and less than 2% graduate with a four year college degree. 65% of the nation’s homeless have spent time in foster care while 75% of America’s prisons are filled with people who were in foster care at one point. It is clear to see that the future of a child in foster care is most likely to be one that is both bleak and lonely.
Yet, there are success stories in America’s foster care system; stories of former foster children who have beaten the odds despite the many overwhelming obstacles placed in front of them. Those few who have overcome the system have battled tremendously against these odds and now stand as beaming lights of hope, optimism, and faith for not only the hundreds of thousands of children currently placed in foster care, but for all those who have ever lived in care or who have ever worked with foster children in one fashion or another. Indeed, these few are an inspiration to millions across the nation.
Fostering Hope for America is a unique book in the foster care world. Each of the authors is a former foster child, and a survivor of the system, or a foster child advocate. These individuals come from a variety of backgrounds, and from different points in the country. The authors of Fostering Hope for America have experienced these horrors first hand, overcame them, and are sharing their stories with the nation in hope of saving other children from living through a life of despair that they faced in their own childhood. These former foster children have come together to provide emotional healing and support to those who work in child welfare, juvenile court intervention, residential foster care treatment centers, foster children, foster parents and agencies. Fostering Hope for America will take foster parents, case workers, and all readers through the heart and the mind of a foster child, forever opening their eyes and hearts to the hundreds of thousands of children who suffer each day in foster care.
America’s foster care system is at a crossroads in this early part of the 21st Century. New regulations and policies are being made at a rapid pace, it seems, as politicians begin to recognize the plight of children in foster care. Organizations and non profits are beginning to reach out to children in care, as well as to foster parents, in an attempt to help. Yet, with all these changes, children in care continue to suffer, as the number of children in care remains at an alarmingly high level. Caseworkers and social workers are often overworked, under-resourced, and overwhelmed, and are unable to properly give these children the attention and resources they need. Along with this, society still does not fully understand or appreciate what a child in foster care lives through, and many turn their backs towards these children.