Our nation’s child welfare system strives to protect children from maltreatment, support families in crisis, keep children safely with their parents when possible, provide temporary out-of-home care for children when needed and ultimately ensure that children have safe, permanent homes with their families, relatives, adoptive parents or legal guardians. This post provides the latest statistics on child welfare in the United States, focusing on foster care statistics, from the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s KIDS COUNT® Data Center, a robust source of the best available data on child well-being in the nation.
KIDS COUNT includes state-by-state data on child abuse and neglect and children living in out-of-home care from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, the federal Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, and the National Youth in Transition Database. These data help our Foundation and leaders across the country to monitor trends, assess the child welfare system and advance policies and practices to improve outcomes for children, youth and families — particularly for children of color who are overrepresented in the system and more likely to experience negative outcomes.
Child Welfare by the Numbers
KIDS COUNT offers more than 60 measures of child welfare, encompassing how many children and youth are in the system, the rates at which they enter it, their demographic characteristics and their experiences in foster care, exiting care, being adopted when applicable, aging out of the system and more. In addition to child welfare statistics at the national and state levels, KIDS COUNT also provides data by territory, when possible. Policymakers, child welfare agencies and others have used these data for decades to understand how well the system is meeting the needs of vulnerable children, youth and families, and how it can be strengthened so that all children who have experienced maltreatment can heal and grow up with safe, stable families.