In recent years, we have seen a rise in suicide among children and teenagers, especially among girls and youth of color. Children involved with the child welfare system (CWS) – where youth of color are overrepresented – are at a particularly high risk. For example, CWS-involved youth are more than twice as likely to report suicidal ideation relative to their peers. However, little is known about whether the demographic patterns some studies have documented in the general population (e.g., where Black preteens are at very high risk for suicide compared to White preteens) persist in this higher risk group, and how race, ethnicity and gender affect CWS-involved children’s experiences with suicidal thoughts differently by age. We present a descriptive analysis where we examined rates of suicidal ideation in CWS-involved youth stratified by gender, race/ethnicity, and age using a dataset of 6,299 CWS-involved youth aged 7-18 and enrolled in the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW) from 1999-2021. The larger sample size enabled us to examine trends within several racial/ethnic groups: American Indian/Alaska Native, Black, Hispanic, White, and Non-Hispanic. Our results indicated that, contrary to expectation, self-reported suicidal ideation is significantly more likely among 7-10 year old children than in older children and teens. This pattern is particularly striking in boys, but holds for girls as well. We also observe similar trends across all racial and ethnic sub-populations analyzed, with some key differences across race and ethnicity. More research is needed to understand why rates of suicidal ideation in these younger children are higher despite rates of suicide death being an order of magnitude lower.