Time to Permanency Among Children Who Experienced Placement Transitions between Family out-of-Home Care Settings

Background:

A fundamental aim of child welfare services is to help children achieve permanency. While associations between placement types (e.g., kinship and non-kinship family foster care) and permanency are well established, it is less clear how changing out-of-home care (OOHC) placements between kinship and non-kinship care are associated with permanency outcomes. In this study, we identified four types of transitions from first to second placement: kin to non-kin and non-kin to kin (switchers), kin to kin, and non-kin to non-kin (stayers). Although child welfare agencies are encouraged to place children with kin to maintain a closer connection to the family members, transitions between homes, including from non-kin to kin settings, have the potential to disrupt children’s attachment to their first OOHC caregivers, potentially leading to difficulties that may delay permanency. We conducted survival analysis and Cox regression to answer the following questions: is time to permanency associated with transition type, and is this association moderated by the length of stay (LOS) of the first placement?

Methods:

This study used data extracted from child welfare records of a Mid-Atlantic state. The sample included 6,023 children who were placed between January 2008 and April 2023, not reunified within a week after removal, and had both first and second placements in family-home settings. Incidence curves over 2 years (stratified by transition type) and Cox regression were conducted in SAS. The dependent variable was weeks to permanency or censoring in the second placement.

Results:

Of the sample, 17% transitioned from non-kin to kin care (kin switchers), 12% kin to non-kin (non-kin switchers), 13% stayed kin (kin stayers), and 58% stayed non-kin (non-kin stayers). During the first year of the second placement, the switcher groups and non-kin stayers started with a similar high incidence of permanency, while kin stayers had a lower overall incidence at first. By the second year, the groups had sorted into a clear pattern largely determined by their second placement type, with kin (switchers, followed by stayers) having the highest incidence. The Cox regression indicated that: the kin switcher, non-kin switcher, and the kin stayers achieved permanency more quickly than the non-kin stayers (72%, 27%, 51% faster, respectively); the permanency rate for the kin switcher was significantly higher than all other groups; and first placement LOS, although having a small association with quicker permanency, did not moderate these patterns.

Conclusions and Implications:

Children who are placed with kin in the first or second placement achieved permanency faster than youth not placed with kin in either placement, with the highest rate among children transitioning from non-kin to kin. Although these results are not causal, they do suggest that children will achieve permanency relatively quickly when starting in a non-kin placement as long as kin are eventually found, regardless of LOS in the non-kin setting. Given that more than half of the children in the sample were non-kin stayers, finding kin could improve permanency rates. Further research is warranted to explore causality and potential mechanisms, and inform targeted interventions and policies.