Aging Out of the Foster System

Decades of demographic studies and applied efforts have convinced scholars, students, and social workers that young people coming of age and transitioning out of the foster care system face great challenges in health, education, income, and general well-being. Despite the wealth of research on these outcomes, we know much less about the lived experiences of young people leaving foster care. Aging Out of the Foster System: Youths' Perspectives adds to this narrative the personal experiences of young people who are aging out or have aged out of their child welfare placement. The authors center the stories of these young people and apply critical ethnographic methods to frame their accounts with attention to the encounters within which they were produced, including power imbalances, institutional contexts, and relational dynamics. By centering the experiences of youths in these contexts and attending to the larger forces at work, this book helps connect the dots between youth aging out of the foster care system, social workers in Independent Living Programs, and the professors and scholars teaching the next generations of professionals working to support the aging out process.

Miranda Mosier-Puentes is Assistant Professor of Child, Youth, and Family Studies in the School of Social Work at Portland State University. Her research is interdisciplinary, drawing from education, social work, and gender studies, and her publications focus on youth aging out of the foster system, social class and educational access, and the relational experiences of first-generation college students. Marcelo Diversi is Professor of Human Development at Washington State University Vancouver. He is the co-author, with Claudio Moreira, of Betweener Autoethnographies: A Path Towards Social Justice (2018), which was awarded the 2019 Best Book Award from the Ethnography Division of the National Communications Association. He has authored dozens of articles in leading qualitative inquiry journals focusing on issues of marginalization, oppression, exclusion, social justice, decolonialization, and critical inquiry.

1. Introduction to Aging Out: What do we know, and whose stories shape our knowing? 2. A. Martínez: My story isn't finished 3. Brenden: Resisting labels and reforming systems 4. Cid: Looking back on aging out 5. Hannah: Aging out in just one day 6. No Day: "I share my experiences with foster care on the daily" 7. Oliver: The emphasis was on getting foster youth to the house 8. Tony: You never age out entirely 9. Conclusion Appendix A Appendix B