Federal initiatives since 1996 have intensified the efforts of states to achieve adoption for children in foster care. For many waiting children, the path to adoption is long. The authors offer an economic analysis of adoption from foster care, with an emphasis on the reasons why achieving the goal of adoption for all waiting children may be so difficult. The authors then estimate the determina...

Relational Match to Sample (RMTS) is a common test of relational reasoning involving matching cards based on the relations “same” and “different”. Children below the age of five fail RMTS, even with corrective feedback. Given that success on RMTS depends on the ability to represent and compare ”same” and ”different”, such failure has been interpreted as indicative of the absence of these abilit...

PURPOSE To determine whether adolescents who lose Medicaid entitlements when they leave foster care are subsequently able to secure employer-sponsored or student health insurance coverage. METHODS This was a 2-year follow-up study of a cohort of 404 adolescents leaving foster care in eight counties in a midwestern state. We conducted survival analysis to study predictors of time to first insu...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that care farming practices have the potential to provide positive outcomes for young people in foster-care and residential care environments. A systematic review (searching; CINAHL, Web of Knowledge, PsychInfo) was conducted to explore how participation in care farming initiatives impacts attachment in children in foster-care and what aspects of care farming initiat...

OBJECTIVES Social network analysis can provide added causal insight into otherwise confusing epidemiologic findings in public health research. Although foster care and homelessness are risk factors for methamphetamine use, current research has failed to explicate why homeless youth with foster care experience engage in methamphetamine use at higher rates than other homeless young adults. This s...

OBJECTIVE To determine the percentage of children with mental health diagnoses and utilization and expenditures of mental health services among children in foster care compared with other children receiving Medicaid, including those with disabilities. DESIGN Analysis of Medicaid claim and eligibility records in southwestern Pennsylvania for fiscal year 1995. POPULATION A total of 39,500 chi...

Caring for children in foster care, as for any child who has complex issues, is challenging and sometimes daunting. The pediatrician should become familiar with the intricacies of foster care agencies and the consent and confidentiality issues for children in dependent care. While maintaining communication with the social services agency, the physician should assume the responsibility for healt...

Family foster care placement decision-making has a weak scientific underpinning. Mostly a 'variable-oriented approach' is taken, which requires a lot of information that is not always available. The identification of clusters of foster children with similar characteristics may be a more viable decision strategy. In this study we investigated if foster children could indeed be clustered, which p...