Foster Care Financial Literacy Training Literature Review Chapter

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Financial Literacy

One of the objectives of foster care should be to provide as any parent or guardian should provide, which means getting foster care youth ready for the adult world. When a youth graduates from the foster care program, ideally that youth will have all of the skills and tools needed to survive on his or her own.

Reilly (2003) identified some of the issues that foster care youth face when they exit foster care. They are generally thrown into the real world without a lot of training, but forced to fend for themselves without adult guidance. The result, Reilly notes, is a series of negative outcomes that seem commonplace to foster care youth. Among other issues, they are often unable to meet basic living expenses, and struggled to earn enough money to do so, or to obtain health care. One of the key issues that Reilly notes is that while the youth were reporting that they had access to education on independent living issues, there was no follow-up. Without this concrete assistance, the education that they received was relatively ineffective. Thus, Reilly is indicating that education needs to be supported in some way in order to be more effective. This is reasonable -- many former foster care youth enter the workforce at a young age, and have low-wage jobs that make it difficult for even a highly-disciplined individual to balance their bank accounts, let alone an 18-year-old who has just left foster care.

Cook (1994) argues that this is often not the case. Foster care youth tend to perform roughly in line with youth who grew up below poverty level, which is to say that they perform more poorly on measures of adult success than the general population. Cook's study showed that independent living skills training was in particular lacking. Foster care youth are far more likely than other youth to live independently during the 18-24 years, but are typically ill-equipped to do so.

Cook interviewed foster care graduates in order to determine how smoothly they had transitioned to living independently.

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What she found was that they struggled with respect to key social outcomes such as education completion, young parenthood, and the use of public assistance. On a positive note, Cook found that recently changes to the legal environment (at that time) had encouraged more training in the areas of money management, credit and consumer education. This enhanced training in these target areas appeared to at least give the survey respondents more confidence in these areas, even if they were otherwise struggling to make progress up the socioeconomic ladder.

Courtney and Heuring (2005) has also discussed the transition from foster care to adulthood, and the challenges that these former foster care youth face. Noting that these are basically society's children, the authors argue that there is an obligation on the part of government to ensure that they are as well-equipped as possible for adulthood, given that they will lack the parental support system typical of other children. Support from families is widely recognized as "an important contributor to successful adolescent transitions to adulthood" (Ibid) so arguably the level of financial literacy training needs to be higher for children in foster care, prior to their graduation from the program, that would be the case for other teenagers the same age.

Almost all former foster care youth struggle to achieve financial independence (Courtney & Heuring, 2005), and many continue to rely on public assistance. 53% reported in one survey major financial problems such as not being able to afford to buy food. It seems, based on the research, that there remain significant issues with respect to providing adequate financial training to children in foster care,….....

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