We use administrative data to examine the temporal relationship between maternal incarceration and foster care placement among incarcerated mothers and their children in Cook County, Illinois. We also compare the discharge outcomes of foster children whose mothers were incarcerated to the discharge outcomes of all foster children in Illinois. We found that more than three quarters of the childr...

The goal of this three-wave longitudinal study was to analyze foster parent stress and foster children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors in a transactional framework. Participants in this study were 237 children in foster care in the Netherlands with, mostly, long placement durations (M = 56.86 months, SD = 49.10 months). We examined concurrent, prospective unidirectional and bidirect...

OBJECTIVE Children in foster care represent some of the most vulnerable children in the U.S. Their higher prevalence of a range of physical and behavioral health problems can lead to greater health care utilization and higher costs. However, many children in foster care have undiagnosed conditions and unmet needs. The purpose of this study was to provide a description of health services accesse...

All children do best when they live in safe, stable, and nurturing families, yet far too many children lack this fundamental foundation. Every year, millions of children are abused or neglected—close to 300,000 so egregiously that they are removed from their homes by the state and placed in foster care. For too many of these children, foster care is no safe haven. Instead, the children drift fr...

Foster care is a protective intervention designed to provide out of home placement to children living in at-risk home environments. This study employs prospective longitudinal data (N = 189) to investigate the effects of foster care on the development of child behavior and psychological functioning taking into account baseline adaptation prior to placement and socioeconomic status at the time o...

BACKGROUND We have previously shown a lower prevalence of atopy in children living in foster homes than in children living with their parents. OBJECTIVES In this study, we explored the associations between atopy and expression of Toll-like receptors (TLRs) 2, 4, 7 and 9 in the same groups of children. MATERIAL AND METHODS We enrolled all the atopic children living in foster homes in Lodz, P...

OBJECTIVES To assess the prevalence of elevated blood lead levels (EBLLs) among children before and after foster care placement, and to compare the prevalence of EBLLs among children in foster care with that of their siblings and the general population. METHODS We conducted a retrospective cohort study using administrative databases from the Philadelphia Department of Human Services and the B...

OBJECTIVE To determine the percentage of children with mental health diagnoses and utilization and expenditures of mental health services among children in foster care compared with other children receiving Medicaid, including those with disabilities. DESIGN Analysis of Medicaid claim and eligibility records in southwestern Pennsylvania for fiscal year 1995. POPULATION A total of 39,500 chi...

Family foster care placement decision-making has a weak scientific underpinning. Mostly a 'variable-oriented approach' is taken, which requires a lot of information that is not always available. The identification of clusters of foster children with similar characteristics may be a more viable decision strategy. In this study we investigated if foster children could indeed be clustered, which p...

OBJECTIVE To examine changes in reported functioning over a 12-month follow-up period and predictors of those changes for a cohort of young children enrolled in foster care. DESIGN Data came from a longitudinal follow-up of a cohort of young children entering foster care in one Connecticut region. These data were originally assembled to evaluate the effectiveness of a specialized set of servi...