I always get confused when I read the stats about waiting children. Everyone seems to agree that there are about 500,000 children in foster care right now, but the numbers differ when you look at how many of those children are eligible for adoption.

The numbers vary because of who is doing the counting and what year the stats are from, and where the children are.

Some agencies might include legal risk adoptions - those who haven't actually had parental rights terminated yet, but probably will. Other agencies include children who will probably stay in long term foster care due to mental illness or disabilities that make it easiest and most benificial for the child to stay in foster care.

Some of the children may be in institutions. Then there are teenagers who eligible for adoption, but probably won't ever be adopted due to their age - they maybe 17 1/2 years old and due to age out in a few months.

Whichever numbers you use, it is too many children waiting for forever homes.

Adoptive Families says there are about 126,000 waiting children right now.

Some of those are in residential treatment facilities, and many are in foster homes - waiting to be adopted.

DHS has these interesting stats from 2006 about where the children in foster care are. Adoptive homes? Foster Homes?...

The AFCARS Report

Pre-Adoptive Home 4% 18,691

Foster Family Home (Relative) 24% 124,153

Foster Family Home (Non-Relative) 46% 236,775

Group Home 8% 43,440

Institution 10% 51,210

Supervised Independent Living 1% 5,918

Runaway 2% 10,930

Trial Home Visit 4% 21,883

We have almost 11,000 runaway foster children living... where? On the streets right now?

That was K's birth mom just a few years ago.

Sometimes the system just can't help.

Some other details:

FOSTER CARE STATISTICS from Adoptive Families

Currently, there are approximately 534,000 children in foster care in the United States. It's estimated that 126,000 are eligible for adoption.

In 2001, about 50,000 children were adopted from foster care.

66% of parents who adopt from foster care are married couples, 30% are single females, 2% are unmarried couples, 2% are single males.

Median age of child in foster care: 10.6 years.

38% African-American, 37% Caucasian, 17% Hispanic, 8% other.

The average child in foster care goes through three different placements and stays in the system for 33 months.

Each year, about 20,000 children age out of foster care.

Next post:

Looking at the ages of children in foster care. Stay tuned!