Episode 2: Foster care: The bigger picture

Foster care is intended to keep children safe until their parents are ready to care for them again. However, in thousands of cases a year, it's concluded adoption is what's best for the child. Most of the children adopted in the United States, in fact, are adopted through foster care. We step away from Yvonne’s story to look at this bigger picture. How are children placed in foster care? How do they leave it? How could the system work better? We brought these and other questions to Richard Barth, dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Maryland.


Yvonne's story is also being told in words, pictures and video. The presentation includes an animated graphic showing how and how many children move through foster care in Yvonne’s home state of Maryland and a chance to ask questions about the system.

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Om Podcasten

Reporter Yvonne Wenger’s series, “The Wait,” began with 73 pages of journal entries that documented her days as a new foster mother - and her attempts to make sense of the moral dilemmas she navigated over two years of learning to love, and to let go. By digging into her own medical history and struggle to have a child, Wenger opens up the complicated world of foster care and takes listeners on the journey of how she became a mother.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.