Source: NPR
According to a new report published in JAMA Pediatrics, the number of children entering the foster care system has doubled in the last two decades largely due to incidents in which their parents are using drugs.
The report took into account 5 million cases of children entering the foster care system and analyzed in how many cases they did so because of drug abuse in the family. The percentage of children who were removed from their families went up from 15 percent in 2000, to 36 percent in 2017. In most cases, the children were under the age of five.
“We hope our findings will provoke researchers to ask … what’s causing this growth, what are the implications of this growth and whether or not our system has to absorb the capacity of increasing foster care loads,” said Angelica Meinhofer, instructor in health care and policy at Weill Cornell Medicine.
Read Full Story: NPR