As the UK Government White Paper, Care Matters: Time for Change, suggested, foster children need the care system to provide them with good quality foster family care that will help them through childhood to success and fulfilment of their potential in adult life. This paper draws on the third phase of Growing Up in Foster Care, a longitudinal study of 52 children in planned, long-term foster ca...

For children in foster care who cannot be reunified with their families of origin, there is no question that adoption is preferable to “aging out”. Moreover, every dollar spent on adoption for a child from foster care yields three dollars in benefits. Yet, 27,854 youth aged out of foster care in FY2010, and, for each child who was adopted during the year, two children with a goal of adoption co...

Adolescents in foster care experience complex health care needs and face multiple barriers in receiving the necessary and appropriate health care services. When the adolescent ages-out of foster care at 18 or 21 years-old they are expected to make a transition to independence with no financial resources, poor access to health care, few personal and family connections and little if any support f...

Over 76,000 children and youth are in foster care in Canada, and their numbers are increasing annually [1]. Children and youth in foster care have higher than average medical, emotional, developmental and educational needs [2]. These special needs are often chronic, under-recognized and neglected. There are many barriers to health care including lack of or inadequate medical records, lack of co...

Foster care is a protective intervention designed to provide out of home placement to children living in at-risk home environments. This study employs prospective longitudinal data (N = 189) to investigate the effects of foster care on the development of child behavior and psychological functioning taking into account baseline adaptation prior to placement and socioeconomic status at the time o...

This study examined self-concept, resiliency, and social support in 107 children and youth placed in foster care in New York City. Of the children and youth, 55 were placed in family foster care, while the remaining 52 children and youth were placed in a kinship foster home. Significantly more of mothers of the kinship foster care children and youth were homeless or substance abusing, yet visit...

OBJECTIVE To examine changes in reported functioning over a 12-month follow-up period and predictors of those changes for a cohort of young children enrolled in foster care. DESIGN Data came from a longitudinal follow-up of a cohort of young children entering foster care in one Connecticut region. These data were originally assembled to evaluate the effectiveness of a specialized set of servi...

OBJECTIVE This study assessed the effects of unified family and drug treatment courts (DTCs) on the resolution of cases involving foster care children and the resulting effects on school performance. METHOD The first analytic step was to assess the impacts of presence of unified and DTCs in North Carolina counties on time children spent in foster care and the type of placement at exit from fo...

No one expects adulthood to occur overnight, but that is exactly what happens to youths exiting the foster care system. To a youth in foster care, reaching the age of majority, typically set by states at age eighteen, means losing everything. The youth no longer has housing, healthcare, financial assistance, or a social worker to call in emergencies. Overnight, the youth is abandoned, on his or...

Breakdown of foster care has been defined as the situation in which one of the involved parties terminates the intervention before having achieved the goals established for the case plan. This work presents a study carried out with a Spanish sample of 318 closed cases of children who were placed in foster homes and kinship care. The data were collected through the exhaustive review of the child...