Okay.
When you get them, there is a link to this paper, which gives a lot more detail about what I'm speaking on today.
I wanted to make four primary points in the few minutes that I have. One is that in the U.S., as in Canada, child welfare is a matter of family law, and has therefore been left pretty much to the states. But at the same time, the federal government, beginning in the 1970s, when they realized that more and more kids were coming into foster care and growing up in foster care and that there needed to be some reform to address this problem, began taking various measures to promote adoptions from foster care. Today, adoptions from the child welfare system are approximately two-thirds of all the adoptions in the U.S. not by step-parents and individual families. So they very much represent the lion's share of adoptions in the U.S.
There's a graph in the handout, which I'm just going to hold up, that shows that in 1988 we had 15,000 adoptions across the U.S. from foster care. Today it's 57,000. So in a matter of a couple of decades, adoptions from foster care more than tripled in the United States. This was the result of a number of different initiatives the federal government took. The first one was an interstate compact to encourage interstate cooperation in foster care and adoptive placements across state lines. This was something that states had to choose to participate in, but about ten years after it began, and by the 1970s, all states had agreed to participate in this interstate kind of agreement.
Another thing the federal government did was to set the expectation that after children were in foster care for a certain amount of time with no progress, the state would work toward a permanent family for these children through adoption, and they provided incentives to states to increase their adoptions from foster care.
They have done other things to provide supports, but even though we've done a great job in getting more and more kids adopted, another thing that is really needed in our country is supports to families after adoption, and some of the speakers have already referred to that.
Today we know that outcomes for adoptions from care are positive, that over 90% of adoptive families are satisfied with their adoption experience and would choose to adopt a child again knowing what they now know. But at the same time, there are many challenges for these families. We know from a very large national study of children, both adopted and not adopted, that about 45% of children adopted from foster care are going to need ongoing mental health services. And it's very hard for many of these families to find help, because in the usual scheme of things, mental health professionals look at parents as being responsible for issues their children are having. Any family adopting a child who comes with severe neglect and abuse issues from the their past will have to confront these challenges. So there needs to be specialized help to help families understand the needs of their children and understand how to address them.
Finally, I think many times this makes people nervous, and they think, “How can we afford this?” We know that adoption is cost-effective. There have been studies in the U.S. that show that the government, on average, saves $143,000 per child for every child who's adopted out of foster care. And the numbers of children in foster care have gone down by about 100,000 over the last ten years in this country, largely due to increases in adoption.
So it's in the best interests of children, and it's in the best interests of governments, but it's complex.
One of the things we still need to do a lot of work on is post-adoption services for these families, both supportive services, like the parent-to-parent support that was referred to, and therapeutic interventions. Many families will not need these services. Some families will just need a little along the way, and about a third of these adoptions will need pretty much ongoing support.
One of the other things I want to recommend is a national database. The U.S. mandated that states report information on children entering and exiting foster care. This database has been very helpful in gauging where we are, what improvements have been made, and what still needs to happen.
Thank you.