Teenagers exiting the foster care system need more than a plastic garbage bag to hold their meager possessions and directions to the nearest bus stop. Jennifer Rodriguez, an attorney who is also the executive director of the Youth Law Center, believes that for too many of these youths, the path from foster care only leads to another traumatic destination: the juvenile justice system.

“I think foster care and juvenile justice sort of live at the intersection of every systemic problem in our society, whether you’re talking about racism or poverty or systemic oppression of any kind, where we are failing in our society, that’s where you see our children show up in these two systems,” Rodriguez told Future of the American Child journalists in Charlotte. She was giving them an exclusive briefing about the Center’s latest report, “On the Threshold of Change:  Forces That Could Transform Future Conditions for Youth in Extended Foster Care.”

Rodriguez has powerful insights about the challenges for America’s foster care youth. “I started my advocacy career as a child in the system,” she said. “I just wasn’t any good at it at that time. My advocacy efforts often ended me locked up in juvenile hall or in a restrictive residential placement. So I learned to take all of those skills in the system and sort of translate them into something that could provide a really meaningful career for me. I learned that in law school you’re actually taught how to be manipulative, and I, according to the people who raised me in the systems, came with that skill already of getting adults to do what I wanted to do.”

Most of Rodriguez’s early life was spent in the foster care system. “By the time I was a pretty young teenager, I already was in high-level, very restrictive residential placements. I was in what was formerly known as group homes and then ended up in juvenile hall, in shelters. I ended up homeless while I was in care and psychiatric hospitals. So when I hear people now talk about young people with complex needs who they can’t figure out and saying they’re worse and they have more problems than they ever did, I have to believe that that may be how people are interpreting it. But may not be true because people describe me as a child in the system that way, and if we’ve been accelerating on the number of problems and behaviors that children have, we’d have a whole system full of serial killers at this point and we don’t.”

To fully grasp the mental and emotional consequences of leaving the foster care system, Rodriguez asked journalists to stand in her shoes.

“I didn’t have a single adult in my life who hadn’t been paid to be a part of that. So when I was 18, every relationship I had with an adult ended. My social worker, the lawyer I supposedly had who I had never met, the staff that worked in the facility that I lived, not only did I not have them in my life, but they were under confidentiality orders that if they saw me in the community, they weren’t allowed to acknowledge me by saying hello, because that would violate confidentiality. So you can imagine how that makes a child feel. I didn’t quite understand the legality at that time, but what I thought is I’m not even worth enough for somebody to acknowledge.”

On the Threshold of Change

By partnering with the Institute for the Future and the California Youth Connection, the Youth Law Center produced a deep-dive exploration into the experiences and prospects of young people leaving California’s foster care system.

“This report is really about visioning what it is that we need to do to change extended foster care and the supports that we provide young people who are transitioning out of foster care so that they can thrive by 2035,” Rodriguez said. “And so it’s a step back from a typical policy report. But what we realize is that young people are entirely unprepared for the era that we’re currently living in and even more unprepared for what’s coming in the next decade.”

California was one of the first states to extend foster care benefits beyond age 18, after 2008 federal legislation provided matching funds for services that would be capped at age 21. The California Fostering Connections Act of 2010, aka AB12, became a model for other states to design initiatives that would provide resources like education, housing support and legal assistance to youth.

Rodriguez said the Youth Law Center report stresses the critical role that having supportive relationships plays for young people who are too often left to fend for themselves.

“What we know is that right now in extended foster care, the policies and practices we use, they often weaken family relationships. Again, there was the question about some of the housing policies. And one example of that is across the country we see housing programs that serve, for example, young women who are parenting, who have a child. And many of those programs actually prohibit the other parent, the father from living in the home with the young person. We’ve just recently fixed this by policy in California, but there are many other states where this practice continues and we see families separated. And again, this goes back to the history of so many of our other public benefit programs where we really isolate mothers and their children. And these are young people who may not have any other support network other than the person that they’re co-parenting with.”

Rodriguez noted an American Academy of Pediatrics statement describing the lack of enduring supportive relationships for young people as a public health emergency.

“It not only results in the emotional problems and the instability that we would expect, but it actually results in all kinds of health problems for these children as they become adults. So everything from heart disease to diabetes, to obesity, to every kind of serious health condition under the sun, they are linking back to folks not having the loving support of family.”

For Rodriguez, once again lived experience is the bottom line. “I tell people all the time that my own two children are the most important things that will represent whether I’ve been able to heal and have a better life as possible. I’ve also got teens, one of which just started college. And so it feels full circle for me to feel like I have actually been able to provide my children a life where they are able to have all the things that I did not have. And I want that for every young person who’s exiting out of care.”

Access the full transcript here.

This fellowship is funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Heising-Simons Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for programming and content.