Foster Kids May Fare Worse After Returning Home
By Suzanne Rostler
Originally published by Reuters Health, July 3, 2001
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) — Laws that encourage children placed in foster care to be reunited with their families as quickly as possible may undermine attempts to help resolve the problems that drove them into foster care in the first place, study findings suggest.
According to interviews with 149 children who were placed in foster care in San Diego, California in 1990 and 1991 for at least 5 months, substance abuse, dropping out of school and arrests were more common among those who were reunited with their biological families.
Over 6 years, 49% of these children received tickets or were arrested, compared with about 30% of children who were not reunited with their families. Similarly, more than 20% dropped out of school, compared with less than 10% of children who remained in foster care, the investigators found.
There were no significant differences in rates of pregnancy, suspensions or delinquency among the two groups of children, who were between the ages of 7 and 12 when they entered foster care.
It is not clear why children who returned to their biological families fared worse in some areas. But according to Dr. Heather N. Taussig, the study's lead author, factors that led to the youths' initial removal—such as inadequate parenting—may have still have been present when the child returned home. Alternatively, the stress of living again as a family or differences between biological parents and foster parents, such as socioeconomic status, could account for the findings, she said.
The results of the study should spur further research, as well as encourage monitoring of children who have returned home from foster care, write Taussig, from the University of Colorado in Denver, and colleagues.
"The study's findings strongly caution us against presuming that children who return to live with their birth parents have achieved positive outcomes,'' the researchers report in the July online issue of Pediatrics.
Taussig said that the success of child welfare has traditionally been based, in part, on the number of children who return home from foster care.
"This paper highlights the importance of examining child functioning as a key outcome,'' she said. "We want to know how children and families are doing as a result of the placement decisions that are made.''
Children in the current study were placed with foster families as a result of abuse or neglect.
