The Challenge of Finding Homes for Rural America’s Foster Children

In 2012, there were 397,000 children in foster care in the United States. By then this figure had, happily, been declining for years, from a high of 567,000 in 1999. But since then, it has steadily risen again: In 2016, the most recent year for which data is available, the number of children had increased to 437,000—and the American foster-care system isn’t equipped to handle them all.

There are a number of terrible reasons why a child would end up in foster care—including abuse or severe neglect—but the parts of the country that have seen the biggest upticks in recent years are the areas that have been hardest hit by opioid abuse. Estimates vary, but for every five incidents in which a child is removed from his or her home, two to four of them have to do with a family member’s substance abuse.

Fostering and adopting children out of foster care can take an enormous toll on marriages and families; national estimates that around half of foster parents decide to stop fostering during their first year of doing so. What can be done to help these children and their families? The problems are not just economic or legal—not just a matter of committing more funds, or implementing some policy fix—they’re