Policy Implications of Foster Family Characteristics

Abstract

The authors of Family Characteristics and Behavior and Emotional Problems of Foster Children clearly understand the significant opportunity and public responsibility to provide assistance to abused and neglected children in foster care. They identify some likely outcomes of the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997, which shortens the time for making a decision about whether a child will return home or go on to another permanent placement. They surmise that children who remain in foster care will become increasingly more challenging as a group. Although this prediction is not a major contention of their paper, because it is used to justify the review, it warrants some discussion. ASFA may have a greater impact on the size of the group of children in foster care than on the composition of the group, although available data make this difficult to predict. ASFA may not have much significance aside from shifting the locus of services for troubled children who have been abused and neglected from foster care to being at home and being adopted. Because it is foster parents who adopt most older children in foster care, many of these foster parents will need the same support as adoptive parents that they needed as foster parents. My skepticism about the authors' assumptions aside, there is still every reason to believe that children in foster care will continue to be a challenging population. The authors' dire prediction is not needed to justify the attention they give to the finding that our foster parents are often not adequately trained or supported to fulfill their roles in the ways that the public expects and that the children need. This review provides a thorough exposition of the limits of the foster family care research, although apparently no studies were excluded on the basis of any of these limitations. Thus reading the review required a constant struggle: to try to appreciate the possible lessons from the studies while keeping in mind that the small sample sizes and low response rates made the studies very hard to learn from. Most significantly, we still do not know whether the respondents were typical of foster parents or if they were more likely to be the least overburdened and most able, proud, committed, and flexible foster parents. The picture of foster home environments and their psychological and socioemotional characteristics may, then, be less favorable than the researchers and reviewers report-a bleak possibility, given the many comparisons that locate the foster parent population below that of the general public. This article may be the first that adequately integrates the burgeoning information about fathers' roles with the literature about foster and adoptive care. This is a critical issue in substitute care, as the proportion of foster and adoptive families headed by single parents has grown in recent years because of special recruiting initiatives for single parents of color and because of the expansion of kinship foster care. For example, single parent adoptions in California increased from 9% of all agency adoptions in 1976 to 22% in 1995 (Barth, Brooks, & Iyer, 1997). The high cost of housing and higher standards of living have resulted in household economies that increasingly rely on at least two jobs. Traditional foster care reimbursement rates are not a net financial gain for any but the poorest single-earner households. Treatment or specialized foster care has higher reimbursement rates for families and can help to substitute for a second earner (usually the mother), because the reimbursements are taxfree. Thus, a payment of $900 a month for each of two children results in an after-tax reimbursement of $21,600. This figure may be enough to keep potential wage earners at home. However, there is a potential downside to professionalizing foster care in this way. When the reimbursement rate rises to the level of a wage, there is apparently organizational pressure to preserve the source of that wage. …