Foster care should be rare and brief. In other words, it should be obsolete.

I am thankful that Child Protective Services intervened to keep me safe when I was a child. I desire, though, with all my wounded soul, that it had been my father who had kept me safe. But he was never around.

I am exceedingly grateful for the foster parents who loved me; some even loved me deeply. I just wish, with all my aching heart, that it had been my mother who had loved me that way. But her mental health and substance abuse issues altered her capacity to love me well.

When I say I want to make foster care obsolete, it’s not so much motivated by criticism of the failing system as it is by the conviction that children need, want, and deserve to be with their own family. For me, family welfare is about mending broken families more than it is about repairing a broken system.

Ask any child in the system whether they would choose a perfect foster care system or their own imperfect, safer, and better-equipped family. What do you think they’d say? If you know the answer, then you understand exactly why I want to see the day we make foster care obsolete. That’s what the children want. It’s also what they need more than anything else in the world.

Written by Robert J. Day, CEO of FIVE18 Family Services