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[quote=Anonymous][quote]
Anonymous wrote:
One would expect that with teens there would be some kind of program that would teach them basic life skills and get them ready to live on their own.
I hear that despite all the benefits they qualify for, only 2% go to college.
Could that be because they are moved around so often during high school years or just nobody teaching them to even apply?
Do they get to learn how to drive?

Step back and think about all the years of life skills teaching that a foster child who has spent a decade or more being shuffled between foster homes and an unstable bio family will have missed.
Start with emotional regulation. A neurotypical child in a stable home learns those skills gradually through toddlerdom through elementary school.
Very basic stuff: Don't hit people. Don't scream at your teacher.
Then get into things like: Be on time. Call if you can't get somewhere.
Kids who grow up in dysfunction miss out on a lot of these very basic principles, which are best instilled in small children who are at a malleable age and want to please adults. Teaching those skills to teens is a lot harder because they are at a developmental stage which is hard-wired to want to rebel against instruction.
Then add in the reality that a large percentage of kids in foster care are struggling with the effects of pre-natal alcohol and drug exposure that cause learning disabilities and emotional dysregulation, not to mention emotional trauma.

Surely most have not been in foster care for a decade?[/quote]

I would like to see the statistics on this as well, though when I wrote the original quote above I did not mean that teens would have spent a continuous decade in foster care; rather I meant that because the priority for the foster care system is family reunification, and because there is a large percentage (not all, but substantial) of bioparents who cannot manage to stay functional, then there are a substantial number of kids who rotate from foster parent back to bio parent and back into foster care.  With maybe some occasional kinship placement along the way, but the overall effect is instability which is not conducive for a child's mental or emotional health, nor for learning the type of basic lifeskills that enable graduation from high school, let alone college.  [/quote]

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