Letting Kids be Kids: The Strengthening Families Act

For National Foster Care Month, we’ve focused on two important and connected issues for foster youth: promoting normalcy and achieving permanency. Achieving permanency, or ensuring that all kids in foster care have a permanent family, is critical for foster youth to be successful and avoid things like homelessness or unemployment.  However, “normalcy” is also essential to making sure that kids in foster care feel supported and encouraged every day.

Youth in foster care often describe normalcy as being able to do all the things their friends who are not in foster care get to do: sleep over at a friend’s house, play on a school team, or go on vacation. It means feeling like a “normal” kid and having permanent family relationships – things that most people take for granted as part of growing up. But foster youth are routinely denied these typical childhood experiences because of the real or perceived need to get advance approval from the child welfare agency or the court, which often prevents youth from participating in childhood activities.

The Strengthening Families Act (SFA, 2014) requires child welfare systems to prioritize “normal” childhood experiences for foster youth, remove barriers to normalcy, and promote access to age-appropriate activities. The law empowers foster parents and caregivers to make decisions about whether youth can participate in extracurricular and social activities, and be more involved in their communities.

By early 2016, states enacted laws and policies to comply with the new federal law, and children and families connected with the child welfare system will start to see improvements in terms of foster youth’s greater access to activities and less “red tape” or administrative delays.

Juvenile Law Center has created a range of tools and resources to help policy makers implement the normalcy provisions of the SFA and to help foster youth, foster parents, caseworkers, and caregivers understand and benefit from the changes in the law.

We created a guide to help states embed the SFA’s normalcy requirements into state laws and regulations, and this one-pager summarizes the key points of the SFA and what youth, foster parents, caseworkers, judges, and attorneys need to know about the federal law. Our Youth Fostering Change advocates developed a written agreement that outlines age-appropriate activities, responsibilities, and life skills for teens and older youth in foster care.

In collaboration with the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative, we are conducting a 6-part webinar training series on implementing the SFA. Several of the webinars focus on the normalcy provisions and can be accessed here: implementing the SFA in a 6-part webinar series.

As National Foster Care Month winds down, we must recognize that foster youth are just like all young adults: they need permanent supportive adult connections as they grow up and should be given opportunities to try new things, explore opportunities and be part of their communities. Only with both normalcy and permanency can foster youth have their best chance at leading productive and fulfilling lives and answer President Obama’s call to “chart the course of our nation’s unwritten history.”