For children and youth making a mental health crisis visit, we investigated ethnic disparities in whether the children and youth were currently in treatment or whether this crisis visit was an entry or reentry point into mental health treatment. We gathered Medicaid claims for mental health services provided to 20,110 public-sector clients ages 17 and younger and divided them into foster care a...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Research has shown that many children in foster care later have psychosocial problems as adults; this is often attributed to cumulative adversities and a lack of supportive caregivers. The risk factors associated with foster care, such as maternal separation and multiple placements, often counteract many protective factors that can ameliorate the effects of childhood ad...

FamilY reunification is a central strategy for family preservation. Although child welfare services have arguably relied too heavily on family reunification to preserve families-and should more often prevent any separation of parent and child with in-home services-the incidence of children with a first entry into foster care has recently reached levels equivalent to those a decade earlier (Goer...

Children and adolescents who enter foster care often do so with complicated and serious medical, mental health, developmental, oral health, and psychosocial problems rooted in their history of childhood trauma. Ideally, health care for this population is provided in a pediatric medical home by physicians who are familiar with the sequelae of childhood trauma and adversity. As youth with special...

Children who are removed from their homes are necessarily at high risk for multiple negative outcomes; they come to the attention of the state precisely because of that risk. Presumably, these children will have the opportunity to develop a better trajectory in the context of foster care. Foster care providers, then, have a responsibility to demonstrate that the children in their care do, in fa...