Another study estimated that over half of preschool-age foster children in New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia in had serious health-related problems, including HIV infection, heart problems, and developmental delay. National studies suggest that the number of available foster homes is declining. One study found the number of available homes dropped from , to , between and Child Welfare , Other experts attribute the decline to the growth in single parent families, the number of women working outside the home, the rising costs of child rearing, the more difficult kids in foster care, low reimbursement rates, and inadequate support for foster parents.
But this decline does not seem to be occurring in Connecticut. In fact, DCF added foster homes between June and February when it reported 1, licensed homes. It also added 57 certified relative homes during that period for a total of And about foster care homes approved by private agencies under DCF auspices are also available. The California Department of Social Services, recognizing that its out-of-home care system had difficulty meeting the continuously changing needs of the children in its care, convened a series of public policy forums to explore issues and trends.
It has hosted six forums attended by state and local officials, legislators, members of the judiciary, medical personnel, foster parents and children, and provider agency representatives. National and local experts presented information on demographics, child development, and class and community influences on child welfare services. Future forums will address program design, assessment, and costs, among other issues. A midterm report released in April made a series of recommendations, including:.
Child protection philosophy has shifted from family preservation to child protection in the past two decades. Laws mandating child abuse reporting have led to more reports of abuse and more substantiated cases.
While federal and state funds have flowed to child protective services agencies, they were often used to expand reporting and investigation structures and pay for out-of-home placements. These priorities affected the flow of funds and other resources devoted to preventing abuse in the first place and helping keep intact those families where abuse had occurred.
The philosophical shift culminated last year when Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act, whose stated purpose is child safety. While that law increased funds for family support and preservation, it also shortened the time parents have to regain custody before the state moves to terminate their parental rights and place the child for adoption.
Efforts to prevent abuse before it occurs or to provide abusive families with services that could help keep them intact could reduce the number of children entering the foster care system. Many states, including Connecticut, have tentatively begun abuse prevention efforts. Here, they take the form of Healthy Families Connecticut, a five-site pilot program that identifies parents of newborns who are at risk of abusing their children, provides home visits over an extended period by trained workers who help these parents deal with the stresses of parenthood, and offers links to community services.
Family preservation services target families that are facing serious and immediate threats to their functioning and stability, often serving those whose children are in danger of being, or who have already been, placed outside the home. They operate under the assumption that children should remain with their families whenever possible, that all families have strengths to draw on, and that all families are constantly developing and growing.
Preservation services, which all CPS systems provide at some level, include behavioral modeling, advocacy, anger management, communication skills training, parent education, assertiveness training, and concrete services such as child care and housing assistance. They are usually provided in the family ' s home to all family members; in intensive situations a caseworker may spend four to 20 hours a week with a single family and be on hour call.
These services are controversial. Critics maintain that some parents are beyond the reach of even the best treatment programs, and every state has instances of children who died or were seriously injured when family preservation failed.
Evaluations of family preservation are mixed in terms of whether they prevent out-of-home placements. Some indicate that families received intensive services when children were not at imminent risk of abuse or placement; others suggest that services do not affect overall placement rates, but they might reduce placement duration, increase reunification duration, and have modest positive effects on family life. If the CPS system cannot prevent the placement of large numbers of children in foster care, it should try to ensure that foster care homes help and protect them.
Research into foster parent dropouts reveals several factors for their departure: a negative experience with a particular child, problems with the CPS agency, insufficient payment to cover foster children ' s costs, employment outside the home, and feelings that no one valued their efforts. Foster parents were least satisfied with DCF policies and procedures related to their role as members of a professional team. The CWLA ' s primary recommendations centered on recognizing the importance of foster parents ' role both to DCF and the community and reviewing DCF ' s mission, policies, and practices to clarify the roles, responsibilities, and competencies of foster parents and staff.
Specialized Foster Care. Casey Foundation, 10 the reforms are aimed at:. With financial and advisory support from several foundations, CCF will examine four key issues that are well-aligned with the aims of the CHAMPS reforms outlined above. First, we will conduct research on the quality of foster care offered by states. We are especially interested in research on how the quality of foster care can best be measured and on the relationship between quality measures and child progress and outcomes.
Measures of the quality of foster care should correlate with, or even cause, the most important outcomes such high school graduation, attaining a post-high school degree or certificate, avoiding teen pregnancy, and avoiding delinquency and criminal involvement.
Second, we plan to examine the best ways to determine state accountability for their foster care systems, especially the capacity of states to conduct oversight and evaluation of the services they are offering. We will focus attention on how the federal government and the states now measure accountability and how the measures could be improved.
Again, as with measures of the quality of foster care, measures of state accountability should be highly correlated with desirable child outcomes.
Fourth, as shown by a visit to the California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare, 11 in recent decades program specialists and researchers have developed a number of programs capable of successfully treating the types of serious emotional and behavioral problems that afflict many of the children who wind up in foster care.
The field needs to know more about these intervention programs and how foster parents can play an important role in improving the success of these programs in helping foster children. A special focus of our research will be figuring out how to adapt these treatment programs to the individual strengths and weaknesses of foster families so that the impact of the programs in reducing emotional and behavioral problems can be improved.
The Center on Children and Families at Brookings looks forward to playing a contributing role in the national movement to help states improve the quality of foster parenting for abused and neglected children through aggressive implementation of the CHAMPS initiative.
Footnotes Hyunil Kim et al. Mark F. Courtney et al. Richard V. Fred Wulczyn et al. Casey Foundation, ; Richard P. Mary Dozier et al. Annie E. Reunification of children with their parents is often the desired outcome for foster care placement if the parent s are able to rectify the problems that prompted removal of the child from home. Over half of the children in foster care return to their parents or other family members.
If parental rights have been terminated, then a child can be placed in a relative's home or adopted. A significant number can spend long periods of time in care awaiting adoption or other permanent arrangement. Making decisions about the future for a child in foster care is called permanency planning. Most states encourage efforts to provide the birth parents with support and needed services e.
When parental rights have been terminated by the court, most states will try to place children with relatives kinship foster care or relative placement which may lead to adoption by the relative.
Being removed from their home and placed in foster care is a difficult and stressful experience for any child. Many of these children have suffered some form of serious abuse or neglect.
Physical health problems are also common. Most children, however, show remarkable resiliency and determination to go on with their lives.
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