Adolescents New York's foster care system are having children at higher rates and at younger ages than other teens. As one of the largest municipal foster care systems the United States, New York City's Administration for Children's Services (ACS) is grappling with the challenge of responding to the particular needs of young parents who are raising children within the state foster care system (whom this article will refer to as parenting wards), (1) rather than within an extended family. Although New York does not track either the number of foster children who are parents (2) or the age of respondents to removal petitions, the office of the Public Advocate for the City of New York has reported that one every six girls foster care New York City is either pregnant or parenting, a statistic that is likely an underestimate. (3) The high frequency of parenting among teens the foster care system is representative of national trends. (4) Teen girls foster care are two and a half times more likely to become pregnant before their nineteenth birthdays than teens that are not foster care. (5) Parents under eighteen years old are also more likely to be charged with child abuse or neglect than those who wait until they are older to have children, and they are more likely to have their children removed by the state. (6) The complicated reality behind these numbers is that because of state failure to provide the placements, services, and support necessary to function successfully as a family, parenting wards and their children are often denied the opportunity to remain together. This failure is avoidable. The state should articulate and implement the idea that, as the caretaker of foster children and the enforcer of child welfare laws, it has a heightened duty to families of parenting wards before and after removal proceedings begin. Legally, parenting wards have the same rights as other parents. (7) Yet, many ways they are still children the eyes of the law. (8) Teen parents remain dependent on adult guardians because many instances they are not permitted to make decisions about their own custody, education, and medical care. They are not emancipated by virtue of their parenthood. Ironically, adolescent parents are responsible for making decisions for their own children that they are not entitled to make for themselves. (9) Teen parents need to be supervised and cared for while simultaneously being given the ability and freedom to be parents to their own children. This duality of roles creates a corresponding double standard for teen parents; they are expected to fulfill adult responsibilities without being provided all of the benefits and freedoms of being an adult. (10) Caseworkers for these teens do not always understand the difficulty of being a parent while still maturing as an adolescent. (11) Like other parenting wards have a constitutionally protected right to raise their own children. (12) Furthermore, federal law has espoused an intent to keep parenting wards with their children and provides federal funding to do so under the scheme established by the Federal Adoption and Safe Families Act. (13) State law provides the same legal protection to parenting wards as to other parents removal proceedings. However, some advocates New York City are concerned that the current application of abuse and neglect proceedings to teen parents foster care the New York City system may impermissibly interfere with their exercise of these constitutionally and statutorily protected rights. (14) They have expressed concern that ACS and some family court judges may be too quick to determine that a neglect or abuse case is warranted against these young holding them to a higher standard than non parenting-ward parents. (15) These advocates believe that the safety and wellbeing of the children of young parents is inseparable from the safety, wellbeing, and support of those young parents, and that in New York . …