In 1996, 530,496 Children were placed in out-of-home foster care in the United States--an increase of almost forty-seven thousand (46,867) children from the previous year.

(Source: M. R. Petit and P. A. Curtis, Child Abuse and Neglect: A Look at the States, 1998 CWLA Stat Book, and previous editions, Washington, DC: Child Welfare League of America, 1998 in U. S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1999 [119th edition] Washington, DC, 1999, p. 403.)

"Since the mid-1980s, the number of children in foster care has nearly doubled to an estimated 580,000 in 1998.  More children entered foster care each year than exited; an increasing number of kids lingered there for five years or longer, an eternity in the life of a child.  Years of such out-of-home displacement can result in lifelong feelings of insecurity, inability to form lasting relationships, and increased propensity for substance abuse."

(Source: Lynn Vincent, "Leaving Limbo: More kids exit foster care for permanent adoptive families, but pro-lifers hope for more," World, vol. 16, no. 1 [January 13, 2001]: 21-22.)

The Bolsheviks who seized power in Russia in 1917 had as a primary goal the abolition of the family. The state, they believed, could better socialize young Russians than could benighted patriarchal families, particularly those of the brutish peasants. Thanks to years of war, famine, and revolution, millions of orphaned and abandoned children presented the Bolsheviks with the perfect opportunity to put theory into practice. Outlawing adoption and ignoring foster care, the Bolshevik Family Code of 1918 sought to just that.  Utopia--dystopia, as it turned out--was at hand. Yet within five years, the Russian communists had discarded plans for collectivizing the upbringing of orphans and returned to tsarist-era foster care policies because "they recognized that, as a rule, families provided better homes than institutions." Writing in the Journal of Family History, Laurie Bernstein of Rutgers University examines the history of foster care in Bolshevik Russia.  The theory, at first, was that "Soviet power would assume full responsibility for dependent children, raising them in social institutions designed to transform them into steadfast communists." This task was to be entrusted to state-run orphanages, in which mortality rates ran from 25 to 50 percent. They were overcrowded, disease-ridden, and fatal places, so by the early 1920s, "[d]esperate to save lives, local authorities...resurrected the tsarist policy of placing orphaned infants and dependent children with families that would in turn receive various forms of compensation," specifically: land, cash, and tax breaks. This policy was formally adopted in 1926 as patronirovanie, and it signaled "an enormous retreat for the Communist Party," namely: "an admission that communist dreams about eliminating the family were unlikely to materialize." These orphans were most often placed in peasant families, despite the widespread peasant hostility to Bolshevism. Although Stalin was later to shift the emphasis from foster care to the placement of children in collective farms, by the Second World War patronirovanie was again the official policy. For the Soviets, Bernstein concludes, decades of "rule, experience, and accumulated wisdom had effected a grudging appreciation of families and familial relationships."

(Source: Laurie Bernstein, "Fostering the Next Generation of Socialists: Patronirovanie in the Fledgling Soviet State," Journal of Family History, Vol. 26, No. 1 [January 2001]: 66-89.)