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Teen Trapped for Years in Foster Care: There Was No Need to Take Me Away

A young man who recently aged out of foster care described years of ordeals and the pain of separation from his family. He says there was never a need for the government to take him in the first place.

His story underscores decades of pleas for reform of the child welfare system, which seems too often to remove children that likely would have fared better with their families.

Michael Ardt’s family had its issues. Like about 2 million other Americans, his parents, Janice and Michael Sr., got hooked on opioid prescription pills. It started with a pain pill prescription for his father’s neck injury in 2000; the parents later took the pills to get high and developed a dependency.

Meanwhile, the injury stifled the family income. Before they got their insurance money, their house was foreclosed, Janice told The Epoch Times.

That didn’t mean, however, that the family couldn’t take care of their two children.

“There wasn’t a need [for the government to get involved.] We weren’t getting abused or hurt in any way,” Michael said. “We were taken care of.”

Taken

When the family moved to Kentucky around 2007, the local sheriff tried to make them leave the neighborhood, threatening that their children would be taken away otherwise, Janice said.

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