Child Foster Care
Watch Foster Care videos featuring the perspectives of current foster parents and
St. Louis County staff.
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St. Louis County urgently needs more foster families. Have you considered opening your home and heart to help children and families in need?
In Minnesota, when children must enter foster care, we first seek relatives to care for their children. Preserving relationships with family members is crucial to a child's sense of safety and well-being. When relatives are not available, County social services recruits community members to become foster families. In Minnesota, more than 70 percent of children in out-of-home placement are in a home setting.
How Foster Care Helps
Foster Care provides a safe place for children who cannot live with their family, or on their own. Children enter foster care because of neglect, abuse, a family crisis, or the child's own needs. Foster parents help by providing stability, affection, consistency, and nurturing.
Foster parents help children and their families
Foster Care enables children to:
• Remain in their communities
• Remain close to their siblings, other family members and friends
• Attend the same schools, team events, cultural and social activities.
Foster families play a critical role. Foster families may provide:
• Temporary, short-term care for children in crisis.
• Longer term care as families work through the reunification process. When reunification is not possible, foster families sometimes make a permanent commitment to their foster children.
• Respite care for children whose families may need a short break from their daily routine.