A Program of the Urban Institute
Our experts identify important emerging issues and conduct timely, rigorous, and practical studies to inform public policies serving vulnerable families.
About the Program
Few systems are as vital to a community as child welfare-a complex interface of programs to ensure vulnerable children's safety. The dynamic steps in protecting these children include support and preservation of families, investigation of abuse and neglect reports, the removal of children from their parents' homes if necessary, and foster care and adoption.
Our work focuses on
- vulnerable families—we watched trends in the number of children in families facing such risks as domestic violence and substance abuse.
- adoption—we evaluated one of the largest media-based efforts to recruit adoptive parents for children in foster care.
- financing—we tracked annual child welfare spending trends for the past five years.
- kinship care—we conducted the first nationally representative survey that profiled children in various types of kinship care arrangements.
- youth aging out—we identified promising independent living programs for foster care youth for a random-assignment experiment.
- screening and rapid response—we proved it is possible to measure the number of child maltreatment allegations screened out by states prior to formal investigations.
- marriage and parenting—we shed light on the need for child welfare agencies to address adult relationships as part of reuniting children with their families.
What's New
With the National Adoption Day Coalition, we have combed through all 50 states' foster care adoption legislation introduced over the past five years. Trends in U.S. Foster Care Adoption Legislation offers a state-by-state analysis.
Children in vulnerable families concern policymakers because meeting children's needs when parents cannot is a public role. Vulnerable families face such risks as domestic violence, child maltreatment, substance abuse, depression, and childhood disabilities. Our new paper distills some of the key trends related to these risks. Read an interview with Jennifer Macomber.
Deciding when to leave a child home alone can be a tough call. Our research shows that over 3.3 million school-age children regularly spend time caring for themselves. A new report illuminates the choices that child welfare agencies make every day in handling child neglect referrals.
Another recently completed study looks at child welfare agencies' efforts to involve noncustodial fathers in permanency planning. What About the Dads? examines how agencies identify, locate, and involve these fathers.
A team of UI researchers are collaborating on a study to better understand the involvement of immigrant families with child welfare authorities. A report is expected out this fall.
We're exploring foster care and adoption by lesbians and gay men and will produce the first national look at the numbers and characteristics of these families, plus the potential costs in trying to limit this trend.
Urban Institute's team of child welfare researchers is now working with a new signature program of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption— Wendy's Wonderful Kids—created to move thousands of children out of foster care and into adoptive homes more quickly.
Approximately 20,000 youth "age out" of the foster care system each year. Urban Institute researchers are conducting the first-ever random assignment evaluation of four programs designed to prepare foster youth to live independently following their departure from the child welfare system.
Recent Findings
State legislatures address barriers to adoption.
Work we have done for the National Adoption Day Coalition takes a first look at legislation introduced in the 50 states specifically related to the adoption of children from foster care. Our new report also examines services that support families after they adopt.
Previous reports for the coalition have found that there has been a significant increase in women interested in adoption, perhaps due to extensive recruitment efforts in recent years. At the same time, women interested in adopting were less likely to take steps to adopt in 2002 than they were in 1995.
The number of children in foster care waiting for a "forever" family far exceeds those who are adopted each year. Children who are adopted tend to be younger, female, Caucasian, and Hispanic. Most awaiting adoption are older, male, and black.
For more information:
State and local spending on child welfare services continues to rise.
Twenty-two billion dollars is being spent annually on child welfare activities. Spending on adoption appears to have increased the most in the eight years that Urban Institute researchers have tracked child welfare spending. As the policy and budget debates continue, it's important to note that state and local spending combined increased faster than federal spending. The funding variability between states and from year to year, however, creates some system instability.
About half of state spending on child welfare services comes from federal programs, with dollars primarily coming from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Title IV-E, which provides foster care and adoption assistance. However, state administrators express some concern that federal budget deficits may force cutbacks in an array of child welfare support services.
In the mid-1990s, two federal laws significantly changed how states pay for and prioritize child welfare services. Although the welfare-overhauling 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act made few direct changes to the nation's child welfare system, it did alter the system's federal funding streams. For one, it eliminated the Emergency Assistance program, which states could use for child welfare activities. The 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act makes safety the paramount concern in all child welfare services.
Since passage of these laws Urban Institute surveys have found, state child welfare agencies—to service their caseloads—have been channeling such federal funds as Medicaid and TANF to child welfare services. The surveys also found that states were spending relatively little on prevention of child abuse and neglect.
For more information:
Many foster children do not receive necessary health care services.
Medicaid spending on children involved with child welfare agencies reached about $3.7 billion in 2001, at least $2.1 billion of which was federal spending. However, there is significant variation in state Medicaid spending on foster children. Per foster child, Medicaid spending spans from $1,309 in Arizona to $19,408 in Maine. Recent assessments of state child welfare agency performance found that only one state met federal standards for provision of health and mental health services to children involved in the child welfare system.
Child welfare agencies struggle to adapt traditional practices to the growing use of kin as foster parents.
In the broadest sense, kinship care is any living arrangement in which children reside with neither parent but instead are cared for by a relative or someone who knows them well. In 2002, some 2.3 million children received such care. Any kinship care arrangement that doesn't involve the child welfare agency is considered private kinship care, and about 1.8 million children live in these settings. Arrangements involving child welfare contacts are considered kinship foster care or voluntary kinship care.
Despite the growth, little information is available on how this approach differs from traditional foster care, so it's hard for federal and state policymakers to evaluate how well kinship care ensures children's safety, promotes permanency in their living situation, and enhances their well-being.
Detailed case studies in 13 communities illustrated that child welfare agencies have acknowledged both the benefits and new challenges raised by kinship care, but have yet to alter frontline practices to take advantage fully of the benefits kin can offer.
For more information
Kinship care policies differ across states.
National surveys of state kinship care policies uncovered differences in how agencies approach kinship care and traditional foster care, and how kinship care policies and practices vary by state. For example, because federal policies allow states great leeway in determining how to license and support kinship foster parents, only 15 states require kin to meet the same licensing requirements as non-kin foster parents.
For more information:
Many kinship care families don't receive the services they need, or even services they're eligible to receive.
Regardless of their income, all kin care givers are eligible for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families child-only payments. These kin can receive foster care payments if the child is taken into state custody and the kin caregivers meet foster care licensing requirements. Yet, only about a quarter of all children in kinship care and 36 percent of low-income children in kinship care live in families that receive either a child-only or a foster care payment.
Many kin also fail to receive other support services, such as food stamps and government subsidies for housing and child care. Of children living in low-income kinship care, nearly half don't know where their next meal is coming from. Two in five of these children live in overcrowded homes or with guardians who have trouble paying housing costs.
For more information
The Program Team
The Child Welfare Research program team is highly skilled in program evaluation, trend and indicator analysis, policy analysis, survey design and implementation, administrative data linking and analysis, and qualitative methods. They are
- Laudan Y. Aron, research associate, an expert in children with disabilities, domestic violence, and homelessness;
- Martha Burt, principal research associate, an expert in adolescents, domestic violence, homelessness, mental health, and social services integration;
- Kate Chambers, research assistant, an expert in childcare and child welfare policy and practice;
- Marvin Eisen, principal research associate, an expert in design, measurement, and analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental field evaluations of intervention programs and treatments for high-risk youth;
- Elizabeth Harbison, research assistant, an expert in integration of service delivery systems, and child welfare policy and practice;
- Robin Koralek, research associate, an expert in income support programs, the coordination and integration of service delivery systems, welfare reform, and employment and training;
- Daniel Kuehn, research assistant, an expert in data preparation and multivariate analysis, and child welfare policy and practice;
- Jennifer Ehrle Macomber, research associate, an expert in child welfare policy and practice, and indicators of child well-being;
- Karin Malm, research associate, an expert in child welfare policy and practice, social service collaboration, and fathers of children in foster care;
- Marla McDaniel, research associate, an expert in child welfare and racial disparity;
- Debra Mekos, research associate, an expert in child and adolescent well-being;
- Tracy Vericker, research associate, an expert in food and nutrition programs, and child welfare policy and practice, and
- Erica Zielewski, research associate, an expert in adoption recruitment, and child welfare policy and practice.
Publications
The Child Welfare Research program offers many publications on the various facets of child welfare:
Quarterly Electronic Newsletter
The Child Welfare Research program distributes a Quarterly Electronic Newsletter that provides information on CWRP's current activities, including new publications, project highlights, and past and future presentations.
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