Foster Care Procedures for Abandoned Child from Age 5 to 16

[cxinw]

Hey, guys. Long-time reader, first-time asker here!

Prior Research Topics/Sources: foster care, foster homes, orphans, foundlings, abandoned children, non-citizen children abandoned in states, adoption, sixteen-year-old orphans, foundling citizenship, accents in developing children, memory in five-year-olds, when children learn parents' names,

Comments

[beesandbrews]

As a four year old kindergartener I was taught my name, my parents names, my address and phone number. This was eons ago, granted, when small children were still allowed to roam in the wild, but I can't imagine, in this paranoid day and age, that most parents wouldn't drill this information into their kids

[cxinw]

Thank you so much!

I intend for his parents to be, well, not the greatest and have neglected to educate him on a lot of these personal details such as his address, phone number, etc. I may bump his age down a year or two, though, if his not knowing these things at five is too much of a stretch.

You make a great point about fingerprints. I'll definitely need to do research into this and see if there's any way for this backstory to play out with his fingerprints on file somewhere out there in the world. Thank you again for the help!

[twilight2000]

also check on "kids" for passports - the rules are different for different countries, but "kid" rules are even more different (as to what info is taken, recorded)

[marfisa]

If he was born here and has really negligent parents, they might not have bothered to get him a passport. Even if they brought him here as a baby and he had his own passport when he arrived (I think years ago kids under a certain age were just included on the parent's passport, although that probably isn't true any more, especially in the U.S.), it could be pretty hard to conclusively identify a child based on a photo taken at age two or under, even if the local British consulate* had access to some sort of master database of photographs taken from British citizens' passports. Especially if the kid had some not particularly distinctive last name like Smith or Johnson that provided little help in narrowing it down without hypothetical accompanying fingerprints

[beccastareyes]

It doesn't take much for US folks to not have a passport, especially since pre-2001, it didn't take one to go to Canada and the country is big enough that an international trip can be a big deal. My passport was expired for most of my teenaged years. Also I did get a passport in 1985 as a toddler, so at least some very little kids in the 1980s had passports, and I can't imagine it's less strict now.

(I don't know if it was required: we were living overseas for a year, so it might have been easier to get it done before we left the USA.)