There were over 29 thousand foster children aged 14 and under living in private Canadian households in 2011, the latest census shows.

A long-awaited new benchmark that child-welfare advocates hope is the first step on a long road towards improving the plight of marginalized kids.
   
The number is as significant for its mere existence _ children in foster care have never before been counted in the national census _as for what it may be able to tell social workers about the foster-child landscape in Canada, experts say.
   
Of those households that reported having foster children, 45.1 per cent were home to a single foster child, 28.8 per cent had two foster children and 26.2 per cent reported having three or more, Statistics Canada said.
   
Until now, data on the number of foster children in Canada was limited to provincial and territorial estimates, each based on different levels of funding and record keeping. Indeed, the census data likely only represents a fraction of the true number of foster kids in the country, experts warn.