The role of out-of-home caregivers in the achievement of child welfare permanency

With the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act in 1997 (ASFA), legal permanency emerged as a priority of those committed to the wellbeing of children who have been removed from parental custody. To date, no studies have specifically focused on the roles played by out-of-home (OOH) caregivers in the permanency process. OOH caregivers may influence the journey to permanency in a number of significant ways: by adopting the children for whom they are providing care, by enabling the timely completion of child-level judicial mandates and by providing high-quality care that can influence child behavior. This longitudinal study is the first to evaluate the ways in which OOH caregivers influence permanency outcomes for children in the foster care system while controlling for child-level and parent-level characteristics. Analyses were conducted on two waves of quantitative data from the National Study of Child and Adolescent Well-being II (NSCAW II) dataset. We find that the availability of respite services for OOH caregivers and communication between foster care caseworkers and OOH caregivers predicted permanency for the children in our sample. Child welfare administrators could contribute to these exploratory findings by evaluating the extent to which their own respite programs and caseworker responsiveness may impact time to permanency and type of permanency in the various contexts in which they operate.