Justin Grosz and Howard Talenfeld and Lexi Kest
The authors review recent reforms and proposals for additional measures to improve safety, stability, and family connections in New York’s foster care system.
Born out of New York in 1853, America’s foster care system began when Charles Loring Braces and a group of social reformers came up with a bold idea to change the social services available for poor and homeless children in New York City. They formed the New York Children’s Aid Society, which worked to provide free homes for children to live with families, rather than in orphanages and almshouses.
Since its inception, many state legislatures, including New York, have codified the foster care and child welfare systems, and the United States Congress began doing so in 1974. The number of children in our nation’s foster care systems doubled from 276,000 in 1985 to 568,000 in 1999.
There were approximately 38,000 children in foster care in New York City alone in 1999, and statewide, figures for the late 1990s show the number of children in care was over 52,000. There are still over 200,000 children in foster care nationally, with just under 15,000 of them in New York.
Although America’s foster care systems have removed millions of children from abusive and neglectful homes in the name and promise of safety, stability, and a chance for a better family life, despite good intentions, far too many abused, neglected and abandoned children who foster care systems were designed to protect are injured by these systems.
Behind the closed doors of state and local systems that are cloaked in confidentiality, tens of thousands of children annually have faced abuse, trauma, and permanent abandonment — not from their original caretakers or families, but at the hand of the very institutions that were created to return them to their natural family.
Twenty-six states have foster care systems that still face class action lawsuits for systemic violations of children’s most basic and fundamental rights to safety, stability and well-being. The vast majority of these class action lawsuits have resulted in consent decrees, which are state admissions of liability that the systems are failing children. New York is no exception.
But because foster care systems are inherently flawed, with many of them able to be likened to a failed social experiment on the lives of children, this number needs to be further reduced. In doing so, New York needs to implement innovative, practical recommendations and solutions. It needs to use the same boldness that created the system to fix it.
Too many children enter foster care; children spend too much time in the system without a family; and the system fails to provide the support children need. This article addresses three systemic issues in the child welfare system, the recent legislation and its impact on these issues, and recommendations on how New York can continue to make bold choices to go even further to protect children.
Too Many Children Enter the Foster Care System
Too many children are entering the foster care system. This is a problem because many of the children who enter the foster care system leave it traumatized, victims of physical or sexual abuse or without a family. For example, as recently as 2023, 30 children left the system only because they died before reaching adulthood—30 children who deserved a chance to exit the foster care system and thirty children who deserved a family died without one. Other children only leave the system because they run away or are emancipated.
In 2020, twenty-five percent of the children who left foster care that year exited because they were emancipated, not because they found a family. Not only do the children who enter the system often leave without a family, but those who enter are also statistically less likely to be able to conform to societal standards or achieve the type of success that society recognizes as such.
In a 2020 study conducted on children in New York who turned seventeen years old in the foster care system, 17% had been incarcerated at some point in their life, 22% had experienced homelessness, yet only 64% had received a high school diploma or GED by their twenty-first birthday.
New York has made efforts to keep children out of the foster care system through its re-enactment of §409-a in 2023. The law mandates that social services officials provide preventative services to a child and his or her family when the official reasonably believes that doing so would allow a child who would otherwise be placed into the foster care system to safely remain with their family.
Though not new in form, this legislation finds new meaning in response to the federal Family First Prevention Act’s opportunity for states to receive federal funding for time-limited prevention services “for mental health, substance abuse, and in-home parent skill-based programs for children or youth who are candidates for foster care, pregnant or parenting youth in foster care, and the parents or kin caregivers of those children and youth.”
In 2022, New York elected to implement eleven new evidence-based practices into its first wave of prevention services aimed at addressing the root issues that cause children to end up in care in the first place.
This legislation provides hope for child advocates that the number of children in foster care will continue to decrease as more families gain access to the resources needed to foster safe, caring environments for their children. Yet both New York City and New York State still face class actions for violations of constitutional rights, maltreatment, and failures to provide adequate placements for these children.
While this initial step is promising, Justice for Kids® recommends another bold initiative targeted at one specific underlying cause for child removal: economic instability. Justice for Kids® recommends the implementation of additional flexible funding to keep children out of foster care. Flexible funding is an approach to family preservation in which social services officials have access to funds and resources that they may allocate on a discretionary basis to address a family’s needs.
These allocations can provide a family rental assistance, emergency housing, household items, transportation, and childcare. In 2025, data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) reported that 78% of the children who entered the foster care system were placed because of family circumstances.
These circumstances include inadequate housing, homelessness, and caretakers suffering from addiction or other diseases. Children who have good parents in bad situations should be able to remain with them rather than enter a system that is statistically proven to cause them lifelong harm. A codified flexible funding approach would allow social services officials to assess the unique needs of individual families and provide them with the resources they need to give their children the safe, loving environment every child deserves.
Children Spend Too Much Time in the System Without a Family
Children spend too much time in the foster care system without a family. Of all the children waiting to be adopted from foster care in New York in 2024, 97% of them waited one year or longer, with 30% of these children waiting five years or more. Time in the foster care system has historically equaled harm, yet children remain there for extended periods of time, lacking permanency and family.
Data from Casey Family Programs, a gold standard for data on foster care and its impacts, indicates that the length of time a child spends without a permanent family has adverse impacts that extend into adulthood, even if that child eventually finds a permanent family.
While some effects are more innately apparent and comprehensible, such as the fact that length of time in care corresponds with adverse mental health and emotional impacts, others are less obvious but equally devastating.
Extended time in the foster care system has physical impacts such as heart disease and dramatically decreased brain activity. It is also linked to negative future economic outcomes because of the disparities that time in the system creates around education and employment.
This means that innocent children are more likely to be physically sick, suffer poverty, and have mental issues for no other reason than the fact that the system meant to protect them and provide them with families is failing to do so in a reasonable amount of time.
In an effort to minimize the amount of time children spend without families, in 2021, New York introduced several statutes allowing a child to be placed in a qualified residential treatment program (QRTP) only when it is the least restrictive environment for that child, and subjecting that placement to judicial review.
These programs are non-familial placements designed for children with clinical needs in compliance with federal regulations. The legislation also requires that the decision to place a child in such a program be made with the input of the child’s family and permanency team, which may include other professionals involved in the child’s life.
This legislation was enforced in the courts in 2025, when the New York Supreme Court determined that denial of an application for placement in a QRTP was appropriate because the child’s clinical needs could be met in a foster care setting.
This enforcement of the legislation provides hope for child advocates that children who do enter foster care will not be subjected to the adverse effects that come from lacking familial structure. To further this goal, Justice for Kids recommends implementing the Quality Parenting Initiative (QPI), a proven framework for reform that works by redefining foster care around parenting and relationships, not temporary supervision.
QPI’s first principle shifts the focus in finding foster parents from those who meet physical requirements to those who demonstrate the ability to care for children and feel empowered to treat the kids in their care as their own.
Rather than focusing on recruiting a large quantity of caregivers, this model focuses on the quality of caregivers and provides them the support and training necessary to retain them. Under this model, even a non-permanent foster care placement can fulfill the feeling of family that children need.
The System Fails to Provide the Support Children Need
The foster care system fails to provide the support children need. The Casey Family Program data above remains relevant because the issue is two-fold. When children are removed from their biological family and placed in a non-familial setting, they are deprived of the most fundamental support system in our society.
Additionally, there is a troubling lack of permanency in the foster care system that inhibits the ability of children to form consistent, stable support systems on their own. In 2024, 38% of children in New York’s foster care system had been in three or more placements, and while data on the specific number of placements has not been captured, experience suggests that the numbers are much higher than three.
This lack of support puts foster care children at a disadvantage compared to their peers who have not been subjected to the system by inhibiting healthy social interaction.
To provide support to children in foster care, Senate Bill S5240A and Assembly Bill A4940B have been introduced into the legislature. These bills establish procedures for visitation between a child and their biological parent after the parent’s rights have been terminated, a procedure previously reserved only for voluntary surrender or consent-based scenarios.
Because the termination of parental rights can be the result of inadequate resources for care of the child, incapacity of the parent, or other similar circumstances, termination does not automatically mean that the parent is not fit to be part of the child’s support system.
Thus, if passed, this legislation would provide child advocates with a legal mechanism for ensuring that a child in the foster care system has access to at least some familial support.
Additionally, Justice for Kids recommends New York create an opportunity to provide foster kids with someone who truly understands what they are going through; provide these children with a system for supporting each other.
Programs such as California Youth Connection and Florida Youth Shine have been successfully implemented in other states and provide children who have been in the foster care system a place to support one another and work together to further the rights of foster care children. The success of these programs in other states suggests that such a system provides the type of support foster care systems have traditionally failed to provide children.
Conclusion
New York, through its enactment and enforcement of recent legislation, has made great strides in the advancement of the rights of children, but they haven’t gone far enough. The data demonstrates the foster care system is deeply flawed. Every child deserves stability and safety. Every child deserves a family. New York, it’s time to give these children what they deserve. It’s time to be bold.
Justin Grosz and Howard Talenfeld are co-founders and lead partners, and Lexi Kest is a law clerk at Justice for Kids, a national practice dedicated to providing legal services to abused, disabled, and catastrophically injured children harmed by the acts of others at home, in child welfare and foster care settings.
Reprinted with permission from the [October 9, 2026 edition of the “New York Law Journal”] © 2026 ALM Global Properties, LLC. All rights reserved. Further duplication without permission is prohibited, contact 877-256-2472 or asset-and-logo-licensing@alm.com.”
