ABSTRACT
Although children have been served by the child welfare system for over a century, we know very little about who these children are. Only in the 1970s and 1980s have large-scale studies been conducted that begin to answer our questions about the characteristics of children in out-of-home care. The great majority of these children have always come from poor, minority homes (Mech, 1983; Shyne & Schroeder, 1978). African-American children, in particular, have consistently been in the foster care population in numbers disproportionate to their numbers in the general population (Olsen, 1982b; Pelton, 1989), and today’s data show no decline in this trend (Walker, Zagrillo & Smith, 1991). Other studies indicate that children in foster care have higher-than-average rates of emotional disorders and physical disabilities (Klee and Halfon, 1987; Schor, 1982; Maza, 1983).
