Factors Associated with Youth Remaining in Foster Care As Young Adults

Background and Purpose:  Very little is known about the factors contributing to whether or not youth remain in care past age 18 in the 22 states that have taken up the Fostering Connections Act option of providing extended care.  Prior research has found some characteristics of youth to be associated with their presence in care after reaching the age of majority (e.g., stability of the care experience; satisfaction with the care experience; desire for independence from the system), but regional variation in rates of exit from care suggests that system-level factors play a larger role (McCoy, McMillen, and Spitznagel, 2008; Peters, 2012).  Information on the characteristics of youth who remain in care as young adults is needed to help inform states’ efforts to provide appropriate care and supervision of young adults and to help identify subgroups that may be excluded from extended care.  This study uses youth’s characteristics and between-county variation in the rate youth remain in care into adulthood to predict youth’s likelihood of remaining in care past age 18.  

Methods: Characteristics and experiences of study youth were obtained from the CalYOUTH Baseline Youth Survey for the 611 youth (84% of baseline sample) who were interviewed at follow-up, when they were all at least 19 years old. At the follow-up interview, 478 youth (78%) were living in care while 134 (22%) were no longer in care.  Binary logistic regression models explored individual and system-level factors associated with youth remaining in care.  Potential individual-level predictors of care status at age 19 included: demographic characteristics; elements of the care experience; educational attainment and aspirations; being a parent; having a romantic partner; mental health and substance use disorders; perceived social support, and juvenile justice system involvement. Recognizing the county-administered nature of California’s foster care system, county-level measures of 1) urbanicity and 2) the overall percentage of transition-age youth remaining in care to 19.5 years of age years were included in the logit models. 

Results: Few individual-level factors were associated with remaining in care: Hispanic ethnicity (OR≈1.6) and being born outside of the US (OR≈4.9) increased the estimated odds of remaining in care while a one standard deviation increase in a scale capturing dissatisfaction with care decreased the estimated odds (OR≈.8). The strongest predictor of remaining in care was the percentage of youth that remained in care in the youth’s host county; a youth’s estimated odds of remaining in care increased by a factor of 1.5 for every ten percentage point increase in the overall county-level rate of remaining in care to age 19.5. 

Conclusions: Most youth approaching adulthood in care in California remain there well after their 18^th birthday, and those who leave care do not differ significantly from those who stay in terms of known risk and protective factors associated with later outcomes. Thus, jurisdictions providing extended care need to develop services appropriate for a very heterogeneous population (Courtney, Hook, & Lee, 2012).  Future research should explore the underlying reasons for regional variation in the provision of extended foster care.