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#314 Jen Lilley - The Dark Truth About the American Foster Care System

The Shawn Ryan Show3h 5m

Actress and child advocate Jen Lilley joins Sean Ryan to expose the deep systemic failures of the American foster care system, including trafficking pipelines, legislative disasters, and the chronic shortage of quality foster homes. She draws from personal experience as a foster and adoptive parent to detail how children are failed at every level. The conversation culminates in a call to action for churches, individuals, and legislators to get involved.

Summary

Host Sean Ryan opens by framing foster care as one of the darkest and most neglected issues in America, connecting it to his broader advocacy around child sex exploitation and trafficking. Jen Lilley, an actress with decades of Hollywood experience, shares how her faith and personal exposure to foster care as a child — through her parents' informal hosting of displaced families — eventually led her and her husband to become licensed foster parents and ultimately adoptive parents.

Lilley paints a grim picture of the system's current state. She notes that 344,000 children are currently in foster care according to HHS, and that 36,000 foster homes have been lost since 2018. She criticizes HHS's new 'Home for Every Child' campaign led by Alex Adams, arguing that lowering licensing standards to recruit more foster parents will attract abusers and exploiters rather than qualified caregivers. She argues that good foster parents are being driven out by bureaucracy, while bad actors are incentivized to stay.

A major portion of the conversation focuses on the financial exploitation of children in care. Lilley recounts meeting a woman at the National Foster Parents Association who described making $28,000 per month by deliberately keeping children on medications and ensuring they failed in school to maximize their 'D-rate' — a higher government stipend tied to a child's level of difficulty. This, she argues, inverts the intent of financial incentives meant to retain quality caregivers.

Lilley identifies the 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act as one of the worst things to happen to foster care. Despite bipartisan support and good intentions around prevention, she outlines seven major failures: it created redundant bureaucracy on top of an already overburdened system; it funded services already covered by Medicaid rather than funding case management; it produced no data requirements to measure whether prevention was working; it decimated residential treatment programs by applying a 1965 adult mental health law to children; and it has contributed to a 36% social worker turnover rate within 18 months. Only two cents of every dollar allocated went to prevention, and 60% of that went to administrative overhead.

On trafficking, Lilley reveals that 63 children disappear from foster care every day according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, with HHS estimating the real number is tens of thousands more annually. She discloses that there is currently no federal or state law in any of the 50 states that criminalizes adopting a child out of foster care for the explicit purpose of sexual exploitation. She further explains that in 33 states, an adoptive parent can sign away a child in marriage before age 18, and in 19 of those states, a marriage license legally shields the perpetrator from statutory rape charges.

Lilley discusses the phenomenon of 'hidden foster care,' where between 100,000 and 300,000 children have been quietly removed from official foster care rolls through informal kinship placements with no court cases opened, no social workers assigned, and no services provided — effectively making the crisis disappear statistically while children remain unprotected.

She also discusses the children who age out of the system at 18, sharing statistics that 46% end up homeless by age 26, only 3% obtain a college degree, boys are five to six times more likely to be arrested or convicted of crimes than peers, and 50-80% of trafficking victims have child welfare involvement. She frames foster care as the origin point for nearly every major social crisis in America.

The interview ends with Lilley outlining practical ways people can get involved short of full foster parenting — including respite care, mentorship programs, donating supplies, offering professional skills to aging-out youth, and advocating to legislators. She closes with a prayer calling on the church to act on its stated values.

About this episode

Jen Lilley is an actress, singer, author, and foster care advocate best known for her roles on Days of Our Lives, General Hospital, and numerous Hallmark Channel films. Alongside her husband, Jen has dedicated much of her life to serving vulnerable children through foster care and adoption, fostering multiple children and adopting through the foster system. Drawing from her firsthand experience, she has become a passionate advocate for foster care awareness, family support, and child welfare reform. In 2026, she co-authored Called to Foster?: An Honest Guide to Getting Started, a practical resource designed to help families navigate the foster care journey and better understand the needs of children in care. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: New customers can save 35% on your first month of Dose for Cholesterol by going to https://dosedaily.co/SRS or entering SRS at checkout. Go right now to https://sundaysfordogs.com/SRS50 and get 50% off your first order. Or, you can use code SRS50 at checkout. Ready to upgrade your eyewear? Check them out at https://roka.com and use code SRS for 20% off sitewide. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at https://shopify.com/srs Jen Lilley Links: Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jen_lilley Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/jenlilleyofficial Website - https://www.jenlilley.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Key Insights

  • Lilley claims there is no federal or state law in any of the 50 states that criminalizes adopting a child out of foster care for the explicit purpose of sexual exploitation, and Congress is reportedly aware of this gap but has taken no action.
  • Lilley argues that the HHS 'Home for Every Child' campaign, by lowering foster parent licensing standards, will disproportionately attract abusers and financially motivated bad actors rather than qualified caregivers.
  • Lilley describes encountering a woman at the National Foster Parents Association who claimed to make $28,000 per month from foster care by deliberately keeping children on medications and ensuring they failed school to raise their government stipend 'D-rate.'
  • Lilley identifies the 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act as having created massive unintended consequences, including defunding residential treatment programs, generating redundant bureaucracy, and contributing to a 36% social worker turnover rate within 18 months.
  • Lilley states that only two cents of every dollar from the $9.6 billion Title IV-E allocation actually went toward prevention, and 60% of that two cents was consumed by administrative overhead created by the new law.
  • Lilley claims that between 100,000 and 300,000 children have been placed into 'hidden foster care' — informal kinship placements with no court cases, no social workers, and no services — effectively removing them from official statistics without protecting them.
  • Lilley asserts that 63 children disappear from foster care every single day according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, with HHS estimating the true figure is tens of thousands more annually.
  • Lilley states that in 33 states, an adoptive parent can legally sign away a child into marriage before age 18, and in 19 of those states, a marriage license provides legal shield from statutory rape charges.
  • Lilley argues that the poor statistical outcomes for children in group homes — 2.5 times worse than average — are caused by accumulated unresolved trauma from years of bouncing between placements, not by the group homes themselves.
  • Lilley claims that children in foster care represent less than 1% of U.S. children but account for 17 to 20% of all people currently in jails and prisons.
  • Lilley recounts being told by a Sacramento official that child trafficking did not receive government funding because legislators respond to constituent complaints, and nobody calls about trafficking — they call about graffiti.
  • Lilley argues that premature reunification is a systemic failure, citing a 36% reentry rate for infants returned to biological parents within 12 months, and a 25-29% reentry rate for all other age groups.
  • Lilley describes a phenomenon she calls 'strategic eviction,' where traumatized children in stable foster homes will deliberately act out to provoke rejection before the foster parent can reject them first, and argues that foster parents who ride out this behavior with consistency see children restabilize.
  • Lilley contends that if just one family from every four churches in the United States fostered a child, there would be more than enough homes for all 344,000 children currently in the system, with room to spare.
  • Lilley argues that the church bears significant responsibility for the foster care crisis because it ceded child welfare to the government, and that many American Christians engage in what she calls 'spiritual gluttony' — consuming faith without taking inconvenient action.

Topics

Foster care system failuresChild trafficking pipeline from foster careFamily First Prevention Services Act 2018Financial exploitation of foster childrenHidden foster care and missing childrenResidential treatment program closuresAging out of foster care statisticsChurch and community involvementPersonal foster and adoption journeyLegislative gaps enabling child exploitation

Transcript

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