Who Raises a Child: The Different Forms of Child Housing
Courtney J. Donald
City University Seattle
Who Raises a Child? The different Forms of Child Housing
Parents sometimes choose not to keep their child after birth. So the question is, what happens to such children? Parents has who decide that they cannot properly raise a child may abuse or, abandon him or her or put him or her up for adoption. In all three cases, the child will be removed from the parentsʼ care and other adequate housing will be found for him or her. Many different organizations and agencies have been established to help place these children. A few of these organizations are: Child Protective Services (CPS), and National Council on Child Abuse and Family Violence (NCCAFV), and the Children’s Institute International. One form of help is the permanency planning system. Permanency planning involves efforts by authorities to find a home that will nurture the child until adulthood ( Waddell et al., 2004). It includes two major forms of housing: foster care and kinship care.
According to the U.S Department of Health and Human Services (2010), “during 2008, an estimated 772,000 children were determined to be victims of abuse or neglect” (p. xiii). If parents decide to abuse a child, they will soon find their child in the permanency planning system. One of the main forms of housing thereby provided is foster care. Berger (2008) defined foster care as “a legal, publicly supported plan in which a maltreated child is removed from the parentsʼ custody and entrusted to another adult, who is paid to be the childʼs caregiver” (p. 227) Even though some individuals over the age of eighteen are in foster care, the majority are children. The reason for removals varies from neglect to abuse. Most people believe that foster care is designed to take a child from his or her parents and place him or her in a foster home with the goal of adoption. This could not be further from the truth. Once a child is...