7%

In 1962, Congress passed the Public Welfare Amendments of 1962 (P.L. 87-543), which permanently authorized federal funding for foster care and officially renamed the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). This legislation represented a massive milestone because it formally linked the traditional welfare system to the child welfare system.

The 1962 amendments made foster care support permanent, ensuring states would not be financially disadvantaged when they had to remove children from unsafe homes.

Estimates from the Children’s Bureau Survey, early Federal Survey estimates, voluntary state reporting, the Voluntary Cooperative Information System (VCIS), and finally, the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) datasets – all imprecise – cumulatively place the number of children in foster care since 1962 at over 22,833,000.

Although data before 1962 is less reliable, combined with what data is available, the number of current and former foster children represents 7% or more of the total U.S. population. This is roughly equal to the number of Asian Americans in the U.S. today.

Since 1962, numerous reforms have attempted to reduce the foster population. Yet even as the percentage of the U.S. population aged 0-18 has decreased from its peak of over 37% of the U.S. population to just over 23% today (the green line on this chart), the number of foster children has varied widely and today is at nearly the same number as in 1962 (the orange line on this chart).

Some of the peaks in the number of foster children shown on this chart resulted from waves of social and economic crises. Yet the percentage of foster children compared to the overall 0-18 age population has increased from 4.04% in 1962 to 4.73% in 2025.

In simple terms, if foster care reforms were the best answer for reducing the number of children in the foster system, the orange line should be decreasing with the 0-18 population. Instead, as the percentage of 0-18 year olds as a percentage of the population has decreased, the percentage of foster children within the 0-18 year old demographic has remained the same.

Reform helps on the margins. But it is not the solution. Our goal is to meaningfully reduce both the percentage and number of children in the foster system and to prepare a better path for children at risk BEFORE the next social or economic crises creates another wave of foster children.