Associations between Foster Youth Family Contact and Social Support, Trauma Symptoms, and Resilience

Background/Purpose: Many young people in foster care miss out on the benefits of birth family relationships, which may have been lacking prior to coming into care. Some older foster youth have ongoing restrictions on contact with family, such as supervised visits or relatives that they are not allowed to communicate with, which may or may not be associated with youth satisfaction with family contact. Other factors, such as youth resilience, social support, and the presence of post-traumatic symptoms, may be uniquely related to whether there are restrictions on contact and how the young person feels about access to family members. This study explores whether birth family contact is associated with these indicators.

Methods:  This analysis uses baseline data from a larger intervention study which recruited a population sample of 288 eligible youth (mean age=17.31, SD=.61) from a metropolitan area in the Pacific Northwest. The sample is 53% female, 19% Hispanic/Latino, and 46% White, 16% Black or African American, 19% multi-racial, and 19% other. 45% were in a non-relative foster home, 23% in a relative/kin foster home, and 32% were in more restricted placement settings. Participants completed validated measures, including the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, the Child Report of Post-Traumatic Symptoms, and the Resilience Scale. Participants also reported whether there were restrictions placed on contact with their birth family (dichotomized in this sample as 79.9% with no/few restrictions and 20.1% with supervised visits/contact not allowed) and how happy they feel with the contact they have (77% reporting happy/very happy vs. 23.0% unhappy/very unhappy). Bivariate correlations were used to explore all variables, and chi-square analysis was also run on the distribution of the dichotomous variables, which were then used in analysis of variance (ANOVA) of the group mean differences on the continuous dependent variables.

Results:  There was a negative relationship (-.251**; x² = 17.937, p=.000) between contact restrictions and happiness. There were significant correlations between trauma symptoms and social support (-.186**), trauma and resiliency (-.159*), and social support and resiliency (.458**). Next, youth with restrictions on family contact had significantly lower mean social support (F=5.088, p=.025) and resilience (F=8.884, p=.003), and higher mean trauma scores (F=6.001, p=.015). Lastly, youth who felt unhappy with family contact had lower mean scores on social support (F=2.839, p=.093) and resilience (F=3.560, p=.060) at trend-level statistical significance.

Conclusion/Implications:  Foster youth with no/few restrictions on birth family contact are more likely to report being happy compared to those who have supervised visits or no contact allowed. Trauma symptoms were associated with lower social support and resilience, which were also correlated with each other.  Lastly, unrestricted family contact was consistently associated with fewer trauma symptoms and higher support and resilience, which may be related to family recovery from circumstances leading to foster care placement. This relationship was not clearly observed for youth happiness with family contact, which may reflect situations where participants choose not to be in contact due to ongoing family struggles, regardless of youth perspectives on their current levels of resilience, support, and trauma symptoms.