Young People Leave Foster Care to a Family

Initiative Policy Goal  

Mandate that all young people leaving foster care are discharged to a family, legal guardian adoptive parent, or a permanently committed, caring adult.

Issue Definition

Until recently, child welfare agencies that were created to protect children and support families would frequently authorize plans for older youth in their care to live independently. Conceptually an oxymoron and operationally destructive, independent living is no longer an acceptable permanency plan for young people.  They need and are entitled to have families.  Unfortunately, many leave foster care without families. 

While the number of children and youth in foster care has decreased every year since 1999, the number of young people who "age out" without being reunified with their birth parents, adopted, or having a legal guardian has increased every year since 2001.  In fact, the number of youth aging out between 1995 and 2005 increased 48% (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services).  Youth of color continue to be overrepresented in the child welfare system, and more likely than their white peers to exit foster care without a permanent family.  Regardless of race, too many youth languish in foster care and exit without lasting connections to family and viable networks of support.

Young people typically do best when they are part of a family that provides physical and emotional security that meets their de­velopmental needs.  Young people who "age out" of foster care without family or other permanently committed and caring adults face serious risks to their well being.  Healthy families provide strong, stable and sup­portive relationships that promote one's sense of iden­tity, belonging and normalcy.  Disconnected young people miss out on typical growing-up experiences in family, school and community that teach self-sufficiency skills.  They are vulnerable to developmental and environmental risk factors because they lack the financial, emotional, educational and protective support typically provided to young people in permanent or intact families.  Social capital, typically rooted in family and community networks, is meager for these young people and creates a tremendous disadvantage in employment, education and asset development, as well as limiting their capacity to successfully form positive relationships with family and peers. 

Common sense enables the general public to understand that teenagers don't suddenly become independent and viable adults at age 18 or 19.  Research tells us that critical brain development affecting reasoning, impulsivity and the development of critical social skills occurs into a person's early twenties. Young people with supportive families are not typically on their own on their 18th, or even 19th, birthday. Unfortunately, state governments betray common sense and compelling scientific research when they discharge youth from foster care without a family. 

Most young people that age out of care return to live with family at some point after leaving care notwithstanding the unwillingness of the child welfare agency or court to sanction the arrangement.  This unsanctioned reconnection with family can be problematic when pre-placement and ongoing clinical supports are not put in place to help prepare the young person and members of the family for the reconnections.  Too often child welfare agencies avoid the risks of considering family reunification or relative connection options - even when older youth in care maintain their own informal connections with family members - resulting in missed opportunities to address and resolve family relationship issues and achieve legal permanence for the young person.  As states review present and past permanency options for youth, biological family members may resurface as permanency resources, even after parental rights have been terminated.  Parents and relatives deemed unfit in the past may become viable parenting resources as a young person ages and matures and other conditions change.  Additionally, some young people that age out of care will find their own family resources within the network of adults who know and care about them. 

Child welfare systems set standards and practice expectations by various means depending on which system partners are involved and how the standards are to be communicated.  Standards may be found in statute, administrative rule, written practice models, client forms, consumer bill of rights, quality service reviews, performance-based contracts, memoranda of agreement among executive agencies and the judiciary and by other means.  The Initiative believes that child welfare systems should mandate, by whatever means will be most effective, that young people leave foster care to a family, legal guardian adoptive parent, or a permanently committed, caring adult. 

Status

Some state laws, policies and practices are beginning to allow young people to continue in care past 18, or return to foster care for permanency planning and supports as a young adult.   The Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008 has changed the authorizing environment and created incentives for state systems to extend foster care services to young people beyond age 18.  This law provides new opportunities for innovative policy and practice to ensure that young people leave care with families and networks of support in place. 

The commitment to permanence is a principle around which child welfare practice improvement and reforms across the country are designed. But even with advances in the knowl­edge base about permanence, child welfare agencies and adult service systems have not achieved signifi­cant increases in permanency rates and improvements in the overall well-being of older youth and young adults. Permanency reforms address multiple ways to develop strong networks of support for young people, including building an array of quality and lasting social relationships, addressing relationships with birth parents and siblings, building strong and effective permanency teams, increasing stability of school placement, maintaining connections to a child's community and building social capital.  

Family and youth-centered casework is a valuable tool for achieving permanence for young people in state custody. This type of casework relies on respectful family and youth engagement, strengths-based approaches, team planning and decision making, and the use of rel­evant, structured and functional assessments. Results from these inclusive practices have dispelled long standing and destructive myths that older youth and young adults can not be safely reunified with families facing serious challenges, or are not adoptable.

"Youth Engagement" is a relatively recent and significant advancement with the array of family-centered prac­tices that directly affects older youth in care. Youth engagement has been defined as "involving young people in the creation of their own destinies" and "genuinely involving them in case planning and en­couraging them to advocate for themselves." At its most basic application, it broadens family-centered practice to emphasize that an adolescent, or mature minor, should be at the center of their own team plan­ning and decision making processes. Jurisdictions use different mechanisms to infuse youth participation in planning and decision-making at the policy level, but many states are learning that to im­prove permanency outcomes, young people must have meaningful input into case planning and per­manency decisions that affect their lives. The life ex­periences of young people can help reshape, redefine and renew efforts to achieve permanence for youth.

A guiding principle of many reform efforts is that child welfare systems and courts need to view interactions with young people through a positive youth development lens.  Young people possess skills, strengths and expertise that can be used in self advocacy and advocacy for systems change.  Young people should be empowered and entrusted with appropriate control over important matters in their own lives.  They should be fully engaged in decisions about permanence to increase the likelihood that constructive relationships will endure.   

Examples of permanency policies and practices

In 2005, Maine participated in the Massachusetts Breakthrough Series Collaborative (BSC) on Adolescent Permanency.  A core team of the Youth Leadership Advisory Team (YLAT) coordinator, a YLAT member, and four staff of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) conducted a self-assessment of the Portland DHHS district office.  The team targeted youth in care aged 11 - 18 as the population least likely to achieve permanence.  Building on the BSC work, DHHS and the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine held a permanency summit in 2008 to begin the statewide discussion and turn awareness into action.  Youth and adults worked as partners in nine teams to define permanence, identify key barriers preventing youth from achieving it, and develop plans to address the barriers.  Youth and adults worked together as equals to draft policy, which was adopted by the department. 

In 2009, a second permanency summit was held, incorporating feedback from the previous summit.  Half the members of each district team were young people. To sustain the work of the summit, members committed to participate for a full year; and to increase diversity of teams, they included foster parents, care providers and legal staff as well as DHHS staff.  Teams looked specifically at data from their districts and developed action plans for the year.  A successful YLAT education campaign resulted in new legislation being passed establishing the right of siblings separated in foster care to have regular visits whenever "reasonable and practicable."  While national numbers of older youth in care continue to rise, Maine has witnessed a decrease as more youth in care move out of the system and into lifelong families. 

Leadership in Tennessee addressed permanency planning practices as an initial step to decrease the number of young people aging out of care.  The Commissioner for the Department of Children's Services in Tennessee instituted policy that no case would be assigned a permanency goal of Another Planned Permanent Living Arrangement (AAPLA) without a review and acquiescence of the Commissioner or her designee.  In addition, DCS has implemented efforts to find and engage relatives as placement resources for youth in care and has funded an intensive teaming process to reconnect youth with families from their natural family and social networks.

Michigan is contracting with young adults formerly in foster care to help the Department of Human Services communicate with young people about the benefits of family permanence. These contract employees help their peers understand the value of having a family for life.  Concurrently, Michigan has also implemented a permanency teaming process to build, rebuild and strengthen family relationships for youth at risk of aging out of care. 

Iowa is developing a youth-centered teaming model called the Youth Dream Team that focuses on permanency and other issues important to young people.  Youth leaders have been formally involved in statewide permanency policy and practice reform.

Hillsborough County in Florida has a specialized Independent Living Court that utilizes a critical checklist to monitor permanency progress and track other developmental matters of concern to young people reviewed in judicial proceedings.    

Related Resources

A Call to Action: An Integrated Approach to Youth Permanency and Preparation for Adulthood (2005).  A collaborative publication by Casey Family Services/ The Casey Center for Effective Child Welfare Practice, California Permanency for Youth Project, Casey Family Programs, and Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative.   

Gina Miranda Samuels (2008) A Reason, A Season, or a Lifetime: Relational Permanence Among Young Adults with Foster Care Backgrounds.  Chicago: Chapin Hall Center for Children at University of Chicago.

The Adolescent Brain: New Research and Its Implications for Young People Transitioning from Foster Care (2011). Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative.

Social Capital: Building Quality Networks for Young People in Foster Care. Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative.

Torey Silloway and Soumya Bhat (2009) Connected by 25: Financing Policies and Practices that Support Permanency for Youth Transitioning Out of Foster Care.  The Finance Project with support from the Foster Care Work Group of the Youth Transition Funders Group

North American Council on Adoptable Children (2005) A Family for Every Child: Strategies to Achieve Permanency for Older Foster Children and Youth.  St. Paul, Minnesota.  Prepared for the Annie E. Casey Foundation

The Foster Club Permanency Pact: Life-Long, Kin-Like Connections Between a Youth and a Supportive Adult.  www.fosterclub.org