Stable home may aid foster kids’ behavior problems

Children in foster care often suffer from emotional and behavioral problems, but a stable, long-term foster home may help, a new study suggests.

Researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia found that foster children who were quickly placed in a stable situation were at less risk of future behavioral problems than children who were bounced from home to home.

The findings, which appear in the journal Pediatrics, help answer a key question about the impact of “placement stability” on foster children’s well being.

Some have argued that children who enter the foster care system with many behavioral issues are more likely to have to be shuffled from one foster home to another—suggesting that frequent placement changes are not themselves at the root of children’s problems.

But the new study took into account children’s behavioral problems when they entered foster care, as well as their history of maltreatment and a range of other factors. It found that placement stability, on its own, affected a child’s odds of behavioral problems over the first 18 months in foster care.

Among children with few behavioral issues at the study’s start, those who were bounced from home to home were nearly two-thirds more likely to have behavioral problems after 18 months than their peers who found a stable home early on.

On the other side of the spectrum, stable placement seemed to benefit children who had more problems when they entered foster care.

It’s not surprising that children who are frequently moved among foster homes often have behavioral difficulties, according to Dr. David M. Rubin, the study’s lead author.

What this study does, he told Reuters Health, is “debunk” the idea that these children simply come into foster care with problems that the system can do little about.

“We can be doing better by these children,” Rubin said.

He pointed to one study done in San Diego County that found that in 70 percent of cases where a child was moved from one foster home to another, the reason was “administrative,” and not based on how well the child was faring with his or her current foster family.

An administrative move may arise from a change in a child’s caseworker or foster care agency, for instance. In some cases, Rubin said, it’s the result of a “decision in a courtroom on a given day,” without consideration of a child’s attachment to his or her foster home.

Greater cooperation among child welfare agencies, government and the health providers who care for foster children might help get kids into stable homes sooner, according to Rubin.

He and his colleagues based their findings on data from a national study of children referred to child welfare agencies for maltreatment. Of 729 children who were in continuous foster care over 18 months, only about half were “early stabilizers”—being placed in a long-term foster home within 45 days.

Nearly one-third of the children never found a long-term home during the study period.

SOURCE: Pediatrics, February 2007.

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