Family ties: A quasi-experimental approach to estimate the impact of kinship care on child well-being

Abstract

The reliance on kinship care within the child welfare system is substantial and has been recently codified into new federal legislation, the Family First Prevention Services Act of 2018, as well as recent emphases that the Indian Child Welfare Act represents the “gold standard” for all child welfare practice and policy. This article uses longitudinal data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-being (NSCAW) II to analyze the impact of kinship care on child well-being as compared to non-relative foster care. We use propensity score matching to mitigate the selection bias inherent in child placement decisions and find that children who exceed the clinical threshold for externalizing behaviors are less likely to be placed in kinship care than foster care. We find that once accounting for differences in child and caregiver characteristics among those in kinship care and foster care, the effect of kinship care on behavioral and emotional well-being is not significantly different than foster care, though are in the direction of favoring kinship care. These findings contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of the effect of kinship care on child well-being and overcome some key limitations of most prior research on this topic.