On today's show, Adrian and Ethan take a look at the issue foster children in our country.

Children are in foster care because they or their families are going through a crisis. Often these children — from babies to teens — have been removed from their parents because they are unsafe, abused or neglected or their parents are unable to care for them.

On any given day, nearly 438,000 U.S. children are in foster care. Almost 33% of these children are ages 1 to 5 and 7% are babies.

In 2021, around 19,830 children in California who were the victims of child abuse were in foster care, the most out of any state. Texas, Florida, Illinois, and Indiana rounded out the five leading states for children in foster care in that year.

A study by John Hopkins University found that children who are in foster care are four times more likely to be sexually abused than other children not in this setting. Additionally, children who are in group homes are 28 times more likely to be abused than children not living in these homes.

Furthermore, research shows that children in the foster care system have significant mental health concerns and that those needs are often not met.