About Youth — Some Statistics

Our Children: Our Future: A research report on Minnesota Children who don't live at home.

How many children do not live at home?

• Nearly 30,000 Minnesota children spend at least one night away from home each year in some type of treatment program, foster care, correctional facility, or are homeless without a parent.
• 15,700 children and young people are in the social services system (primarily for child protection). Within this group, the majority are there due to neglect.
• An estimated 8,300 additional children are in the corrections system without being tracked by the social services system.
• Approximately 5,200 other children are homeless and on their own.
• A survey showed that 45% of homeless youth who had stayed in an emergency shelter had no place to go afterwards.

Why don't these children live at home?

Children leave or are removed from their homes for many different reasons.  Some of the most common reasons include the following:

• To protect them from maltreatment (physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse and most commonly neglect).
• Their parent(s) cannot care for them because of illness, death, imprisonment or other reasons.
• Drug or alcohol abuse by parent and/or child.
• Child is released from foster care or correctional facility and has nowhere to go from there.
• Natural disaster.

National Poverty:

• One in six children in the United States lives in poverty.
• More than 2.5 million children live in poverty in rural America.