Quote · The Shawn Ryan Show
#314 Jen Lilley - The Dark Truth About the American Foster Care System
Where this was said
Hidden Foster Care and the Collapse of Official Numbers
At 1:46:40 · chapter starts 1:39:50
Preparing for this interview, Jen Lilley checked the AFCARS report and was shocked to find the number of children in foster care had dropped from 437,000 at its 2018-2019 peak to 330,000. She called Dr. DiGarmo to ask if the advocacy community had finally made a dent. His answer: the numbers look lower because children have been moved off the books, not out of danger. Lilley breaks the approximately 170,000-child discrepancy into two buckets. First, 55,000 children are in unlicensed kinship care — placed with grandparents or relatives who receive little or no financial assistance, no parenting training, and no information about predators targeting children online. Second, an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 children (per the Annie E. Casey Foundation's 2024/2025 report) are in hidden foster care — children that child welfare knows need to be removed but quietly re-homes with relatives without opening a court case, so they have no social worker, no Medicaid, and no record. The crisis has not shrunk; it has been hidden.
Between 2018 and 2024, roughly 170,000 children were quietly removed from official foster care statistics through unlicensed kinship placements and hidden foster care. The press release writes itself: we're fixing it. The reality: these kids have no social worker, no Medicaid, no case. No one is watching them.
Between 2018 and 2024, approximately 170,000 children were effectively removed from official foster care statistics via hidden foster care and unlicensed kinship placements.
The 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act was supposed to prevent kids from ever entering foster care. Instead it created mountains of new bureaucracy, defunded therapeutic group homes for the most severely abused children, and produced zero measurable data on whether prevention was even working. Eight years in, only 2 cents of every Title IV-E dollar went to prevention.
