The Child Welfare Experience Over the First Nine Year of Life - the Effect of Multiple Entries Into Care

Background and Purpose: Child welfare administrative data are frequently used to provide an understanding of foster care entries, time in care, and exits, including exits to settings of intended permanency – reunification, adoption, and guardianship. The purpose of this study was to develop and demonstrate a methodology to determine the degree to which children who leave their first care episode to various sorts of intended permanency actually experience permanency. The working null hypothesis was that the type of exit would not make a difference in the frequency of reentry or in the children's future status.

Methods: This was a descriptive, longitudinal study of a cohort of the 5,873 California children who were born in 1999 and who entered foster care before their first birthday. The study used administrative data from California's Child Welfare Services Case Management System maintained by the Center for Social Services Research at the University of California, Berkeley to follow the children until their ninth birthday. The study linked data across placement episodes, including pre and post-adoption data. It also linked the data of the study cohort children with that of their parents and siblings. Logistic regression models were used to identify the association of various characteristics (e.g., having had a previous sibling adopted) with initial entry status, initial exit status, reentry, and status at age 9.

Results: Only 1.9% of the study children never exited from care. At the end of their first period of care, 45.9% of children returned home (“reunified”) and 44.2% were adopted. However, because reentry is most likely for children who reunify and because reentry often does not lead to reunification, at age nine 36.0% of the cohort children had last exited to reunification, 50.7% had last exited to adoption, and 4.8% were in care.

Conclusions and Implications: Three broad themes emerge from the application of the study methodology. First, not all forms of permanency provide the same level of stability. Reunification is less stable than adoption or guardianship. Second, first placement episode data alone provide an inadequate, distorted description of the experience of children in the foster care system. First episode data alone overstate the frequency of stable reunification and understate the number of children who are adopted as well as the number who are in care. Third, the vast majority of the cohort children achieved permanency, most often in the form of adoption but also in the forms of reunification and guardianship. This is consistent with the policy and practice reforms that have occurred in the field of child welfare over the past thirty plus years and supports their continued application. These changes have successfully striven to replace open-ended foster care with more secure relationships. The next step in this research is its replication over longer periods of time with different cohorts of children, especially those who first enter foster care after infancy.