Comparing Kin and Non-Kin Foster Parent's Commitment to Their Young Children

Purpose: In 2007, there were reports of child maltreatment affecting over 3.5 million children in the United States, which resulted in 794,000 children being validated as having experienced some sort of abuse or neglect. As a result, 510,000 children were in foster care with an estimated additional 300,000 in voluntary kin placements (U.S. D.H.H.S. Children's Bureau, 2009). Research demonstrates that children in kinship care are often at greater risk than those children placed in non-kin foster homes, particularly in terms of poverty, sub-standard housing, and receiving less support from Child Protective Services (CPS; Cuddeback, 2004). Despite these findings, federal legislation requires that CPS agencies consider giving preference to adult relatives of the child over non-kin caregivers when choosing foster placement settings (42 U.S.C. 671(a)(19). Studies of foster care dyads have demonstrated that the degree to which a foster mother is emotionally invested in or committed to her foster child is an important predictor in the success of the placement and the well-being of the child (Ackerman & Dozier, 2005; Bates & Dozier, 2002; Dozier & Lindhiem, In press). This presentation will describe the findings from a study that explored the differences in commitment to and parental perceptions of foster children between kin and non-kin foster parents.

Method: The Working Model of the Child Interview (WMCI; Zeanah & Benoit, 1995) responses of 30 kin and 33 non-kin foster mothers were obtained from an “infant team” which was providing clinical services to the foster children and caregivers. The This is My Baby Interview rating scales (TIMB; Ackerman & Dozier, 2005) were applied independently by two raters to the WMCI responses to measure the foster mothers' commitment to their foster children. Both raters were masked to the kinship status of the respondents and one rater was masked to the research question. The classification system for the WMCI was also used to determine a classification for each caregiver's perception of her foster child. A randomly selected sub-set (20%) was double coded for inter-rater reliability analysis.

Results: Multiple linear regression was used to compare the level of commitment to foster child between the kin and non-kin groups. Results indicated that non-kin foster mothers expressed greater levels of commitment to their foster children compared to kin-foster mothers. A chi-square analysis also indicated that non-kin foster parents' representations of their foster children were more balanced as opposed to that of kin foster parents, whose representations were similar to that of other high-risk, clinical populations

Conclusions and Implications: The findings from this study offer additional support to previous studies which suggest that kin foster parents have increased risk factors when compared to non-kin foster parents. These findings add to the growing body of literature that suggest that policies that mandate preferential foster placement with kin caregivers without providing for additional support or assessment of the caregivers may need to be reconsidered.