Marin Magazine - April 2020

that commitment, even if their heart is in it,”
says Leslie Fields, a CFS recruitment and
support specialist. “But we want people to
know there are all sorts of ways they can get
connected to the foster community and help
these families.”
This mission couldn’t be more important,
because in Marin, as in communities across
America, there is a severe shortage of foster
homes. In 2019, Marin had 121 kids in foster
care; 37 percent were placed out of county.

A third of those went to homes of relatives
or extended family, but the rest were sent to
live with strangers far away. “We have kids in
Stockton, Concord, Sacramento, Oakland and
as far away as Long Beach and Los Angeles,”
says Fields. “They are often in a community
they’ve never even visited.”
The children entering foster care span all
ages and backgrounds. In 2019, 34 children
entered foster care in Marin for the first
time; of those, nine were babies age 1 year or
younger, 9 were ages 2 to 5, 11 were bet ween

6 and 12, and five were teenagers 13 to 17.
The shortage of homes is most serious for
teenagers, particularly teenage girls.

Children are removed from their original family household when a parent’s behavior puts them at risk. While physical and sexual abuse do occur, the majority of cases, in Marin and nationwide, are attributable to general neglect. “We see a lot of situations in which the parent isn’t providing for very basic needs, like food and shelter, leading to a safety risk for the child,” says Marchman, “or there’s a lack of supervision, like we find the child wandering in the street at night.” A parent’s involvement with drugs or alcohol or mental illness are often factors. Nationwide, in 2018, of the 163,500 children entering foster care,

94,400 were there because of a parent’s sub-
stance abuse, up from 92, 100 in 2017.

One assumption people working in the
foster care system are eager to correct is that
children who endured neglectful or abusive
situations are different from other kids or are
permanently scarred in ways that prevent
them from ever having healthy lives. “Sadly,
we have these negative stereotypes and people
are nervous; they feel that these are damaged
children,” says Fields. “Certainly, they’ve
experienced trauma, but that doesn’t mean
they can’t thrive once they’re out of the cha-
otic situation; in fact, many do really well.”

Learning to Thrive

It was the sudden death of her mother that put Jessica Karner into the foster care system at age 10, along with her older sister, age 12. Their father was alcoholic and unable to take custody, so the girls were placed in a home with a kind and supportive couple who helped them adjust to their loss.

“They were very loving; they did everything you would want a family to do when helping kids in a crisis like that,” Karner recalls. Then the couple had to move out of state, and the sisters were placed in another home, which proved much less kind. “I saw both sides of it, very positive and very negative,” she says, “and I saw what a difference it made to go to a loving home.” Karner and her sister were lucky: their mother’s younger sister, 22 at the time, was able to move them to California, where she and her young husband raised them to adulthood.