Foster Care

There are an estimated 153 million children around the world who have lost one or both parents.¹ Millions more children have been abandoned or displaced, with exact figures unknown. Over 5,700 children are orphaned daily, and more than 8 million orphaned children live in institutional care rather than with a family or in a foster home.² In the United States alone, nearly half a million — 437,465 — children were in the foster care system in 2017. In that same year, 250,248 children left the foster care system, and 273,539 entered the system. Of those children, 117,794 were awaiting adoption.³ The average age of a child in the foster care system in the United States is 8.5 years.⁴ In over 50 percent of these children’s cases, the objective is to reunite the child with their original family. However, for just over a quarter of all children in the foster care system, the goal is adoption.⁵