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Leapfrogging the margin: securing independence for systems youth

The ultimate goal of both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and indeed that of parenting

itself, is to empower youth to become independent, healthy, socially-integrated adults. Insofar as the

state (or other entities) act in loco parentis, it is their responsibility to ensure that systems youth have a

future to grow up into: a future in which they will be able to pay rent, provide for their basic needs, andexplore what life has to offer outside the bounds of the system.

This fundamental mandate has been complicated by the increasing changes in the way the general

population in the United States transitions to adulthood. To wit: as of 2010 close to 43% of 25-34 year

olds live with their parents, according to Census data. Youth aged 16-24 have an unemployment rate of

16.8%, nearly double the national rate of 8.6% (per federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data). They are

increasingly more dependent on their parents for their basic needs, and often find it difficult to compete

for jobs with older people who have better qualifications and experience, but who are also unemployed

because of the tight labor market. As a result, many developmental psychologists feel that a new

developmental stage, emerging adulthood, has come into being between the adole scent and adult

phases of human development.

The trouble is that systems youth, in the main, do not have the luxury of a long postadolescent period.

The strong correlation between systems involvement and poverty means that they will be unable to

depend on parental support, as more affluent youth can. Foster youth often do not have functional

parents at all; certainly it seems unlikely that they could count on support from their parents after they

reach the age of majority, given that they could not count on that support before they reached it. Most

government assistance for youth ends at age 18what little is left is usually gone by age 21.

This is unlikely to change in the near future, at least in Washington State. Three years of extraordinarily

large cuts in social services combined with the legislatures inability to create new revenue streams,except with a politically infeasible two-thirds majority, means that even the most persuasive argument

to extend the duration of foster care or pour money into assistance programs for youth will not prevail

in the face of a government that can no longer even provide the services and assistance it has provided,

much less new programs. We must seek ways to multiply the effect of whatever dollars we have left,

and make decisions based on the understanding that any increase in funding for one aspect of the

system means cuts elsewhere.

Essentially, in order to succeed, systems youth have to reach independence much faster (on the order of

a decade faster) than the general youth population. That means that they need to be able to provide for

their own basic needs, which means having an income, which (in all but a small minority of cases) meansthat they need to find employment---stable, full-time employment. In order to do so they must have

basic skills, including the ability to write a resume and cover letter, transport oneself to and from a job

site on time, dress and act in a manner befitting the culture of the workplace, and so on. But more

importantly, they must be more employable than over a sixth of the non-student youth population;

they must be able to outcompete youth who have the benefit of stable families and clean records.

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In a labor market defined by a shrinking middle class and an expanding lower class, this poses a grave

ethical dilemma: what sort of employment expectations should we have for systems youth? Should we

be preparing them for low-wage, low-or-no benefit service industry jobs because thats what the current

labor market is demanding? Should we invest more resources in higher education opportunities, even as

the cost of higher education skyrockets and the economic benefit (in terms of real wages) stays more or

less constant? What about programs and initiatives that aim to launch systems youth into the cultural

and economic elite? Are those programs an effective expenditure of resources? Do they result in more

systems youth having better chances at independence?