Developmental Issues in Foster Care for Children

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 91 (5) ◽  
pp. 1007-1009
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Foster Care ◽  
Best Interests ◽  
Legal Responsibility ◽  
Permanency Planning ◽  
Best Interest ◽  
Developmental Needs ◽  
Social Service Agencies ◽  
Developmental Issues ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Children In Foster Care

Pediatricians who provide care for children in foster care have a unique opportunity and a special responsibility to assess the totality of the child's experience and to be a sympathetic and objective advocate for the child.1 Many children in foster care have suffered repeated abuse and prolonged neglect and often have a myriad of unmet medical and mental health needs.2 However, paramount in the lives of these children is their need for continuity and a sense of permanence. Legal responsibility for establishing where these children will live and which adults will have custody of them rests jointly with the child welfare system and the judiciary. Pediatricians and other professionals with expertise in child development should participate actively as advisors to social workers and judges about the child's needs and best interests, especially in the context of placement and permanency planning. Maintaining the integrity of distressed families by providing adequate support services is generally in the best interest of the child. Keeping families together, however, may not be best for all children. Alternatives based upon an assessment of the developmental needs of the children and the capabilities of the family to meet those needs must be given consideration. As a society we value the rights of the birth family, sometimes hold them to be inviolable, and presume that families are competent. This belief and a lack of resources for assessment, planning, and services have resulted in inaccurate assessment of the child's relationships with his/her family by social service agencies and courts.

Health Care of Foster Children

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 79 (4) ◽  
pp. 644-646 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Social Support ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Foster Care ◽  
Foster Children ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Well Being ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Best Interests ◽  
Social Service Agencies ◽  
Developmental Problems

Children entering foster care generally have a higher than average number of health problems, and the care they receive is usually insufficient to meet their needs. These circumstances arise from the preplacement history of these children and from within the dual systems of foster care and publicly funded health care to which responsibility for their well-being is assigned. BACKGROUND Children enter foster care because their parents are unwilling or unable to provide for their physical and emotional needs. Most often, these children come from single-parent households where poverty, lack of formal education, and absence of social support contribute to inadequate and inappropriate child care. More than 80% of the children have experienced physical or sexual abuse and/or neglect. Their previous health care is likely to have been fragmented. As a consequence, foster children are likely to have unrecognized or untreated chronic disorders, a high rate of emotional and developmental problems, and impaired school performance. Placement of children into foster care is ordinarily a court-ordered process used when the application of resources by social service agencies fail to, or appear unlikely to, improve a home situation deemed detrimental to the children's well-being. Foster care is intended to be a planned temporary service designed to strengthen families and to enhance the quality of life for children. The imposed separation of children from parents is a decision intended to be based on the best interests of the children. It is to be an opportunity for families to receive the social support and counsel they require to be reconstituted.

Children in Foster Care: Possible factors affecting permanency planning

1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 329-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric C. Albers ◽  
Thom Reilly ◽  
Barbara Rittner
Keyword(s):  
Foster Care ◽  
Permanency Planning ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Children In Foster Care

In the Child’s Best Interest: Terminating the Rights of Fathers With Children in Foster Care

2010 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Spencer B. Olmstead ◽  
Lenore M. McWey ◽  
Tammy Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Foster Care ◽  
Best Interest ◽  
Children In Foster Care

Health Care of Children in Foster Care

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Foster Care ◽  
Behavioral Problems ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
School Achievement ◽  
Emotional And Behavioral Problems ◽  
Socioeconomic Background ◽  
Permanency Planning ◽  
State Custody ◽  
Number Of Children ◽  
Children In Foster Care

The foster care system in America has evolved as a means of providing protection and shelter for children who require out-of-home placement.1 It is designed to be a temporary service, with a goal of either returning children home or arranging for suitable adoptive homes. In recent years, child welfare agencies have been directing greater efforts toward supporting families in crisis to prevent foster care placements whenever feasible and to reunify families as soon as possible when placements cannot be avoided. Increasingly, extended family members are being recruited and assisted in providing kinship care for children when their biologic parents cannot care for them. However, during the past decade the number of children in foster care has nearly doubled, despite landmark federal legislation designed to expedite permanency planning for children in state custody.2 It is estimated that by 1995 more than 500 000 children will be in foster care.3 In large part, this unrelenting trend is the result of increased abuse and neglect of children occurring in the context of parental substance abuse, mental illness, homelessness, and human immunodeficiency virus infection.4 As a result, a disproportionate number of children placed in foster care come from that segment of the population with the fewest social and financial resources and from families that have few personal and limited extended family sources of support.5 It is not surprising then that children entering foster care are often in poor health. Compared with children from the same socioeconomic background, they suffer much higher rates of serious emotional and behavioral problems, chronic physical disabilities, birth defects, developmental delays, and poor school achievement.6-13

Maintaining Attachment Relationships among Children in Foster Care

1994 ◽  
Vol 75 (5) ◽  
pp. 269-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Kevin Grigsby
Keyword(s):  
Foster Care ◽  
Permanency Planning ◽  
Protective Services ◽  
Attachment Relationship ◽  
Attachment Relationships ◽  
Children In Foster Care ◽  
Child Attachment ◽  
Child Visitation ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Parent Child

Frequent, regular parent–child visitation of children in foster care is crucial in maintaining the attachment relationship of the parent and child. Further, the parent–child attachment concept is crucial for permanency planning because it is the rationale behind the goal of providing children with a stable and continuous relationship with the parent or another caretaker, if that child cannot return to the care of the parent. In order to ascertain whether protective services workers recognize and emphasize the importance of maintaining parent–child or other attachment relationships, the author studied closed case records of children who had experienced foster-care placement. Results are discussed in the context of social-attachment theory.

Foster Care—In Whose Best Interest?

1973 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 599-638 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Mnookin
Keyword(s):  
Foster Care ◽  
Juvenile Court ◽  
The State ◽  
Best Interests ◽  
Best Interest ◽  
Stable Environment ◽  
Legal Standard ◽  
Poor Families ◽  
Case Basis ◽  
Court Process

Under existing law, judges have wide discretionary authority to remove "neglected"children from their natural parents and place them in state-controlled foster care. The children are for the most part from poor families. The author describes the process by which the state can coercively remove children from their parents, and he analyzes the best interests of the child test, the legal standard courts usually employ to decide whether a neglected child should be removed from parental custody. He suggests that this standard requires predictions that cannot be made on a case by case basis and necessarily gives individual judges too much discretion to impose their own values in deciding what is best for a child. While critical of the procedural informality of the current juvenile court process, he believes additional procedural safeguards for children and their parents are in themselves unlikely to remedy the situation. He goes on to propose a new standard to limit removal to cases where there is an immediate and substantial danger to the child's health and where there are no reasonable means of protecting the child at home. In addition, a standard is proposed to ensure that prompt steps are taken to provide children who must be removed with a stable environment.

In ‘The Best Interests of the Child’: Critical Reflections on an Overused Construct

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Hansen ◽  
Frank Ainsworth
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Child Abuse ◽  
Foster Care ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Kinship Care ◽  
Best Interests ◽  
Best Interest ◽  
Abuse And Neglect ◽  
Protection Legislation

The construct ‘the best interest of the child’ is embedded in child protection legislation in all Australian states and territories. This phrase or construct in its modern iteration that dates from 1973 is constantly evoked when decisions are being made about a child's future following the substantiation of a case of child abuse and neglect. The use of the best interests of the child as a standard for decision-making, even though there is no consensus in law or social science as to what the construct means, needs to be questioned. What often follows from reliance on the best interests of the child is the placement of a child in foster care or kinship care in the hope that this will produce a better outcome for the child than if they remained in parental care. No doubt this is true for some children. Recent outcomes studies of foster care point to less than promising results for many children. As a result it can be argued that placing a child in foster care is a gamble with the child's future life.

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