Children in foster care: Their condition, changes in their condition during their stay in foster care and the predictors of these changes

Background and Goals

Placement of children in foster care is employed in order to protect them from a harmful home environment, which includes abuse or neglect, and in order to foster their physical and mental welfare through a nurturing foster family.

This study aims to test the characteristics of the physical, emotional, cognitive and behavioral aspects of children who were taken out of their homes and were placed in foster families, as well as the extent to which these parameters changed during the stay in these families. The study employs the monitoring approach, creating an empirical, evidence-based database. The goal of this study is to describe these characteristics in each of the aspects above, the magnitude and direction of changes and to identify the identity groups who differ in these two parameters (the basic characteristics and the magnitude and direction of the change). The study tested the variables described above while taking into consideration the following factors: sex, age of placement in foster care, religious orientation and intelligence of the child. By doing so, this study helps to establish a scientific infrastructure which will aid clinicians to act toward the improvement in the characteristics of children in foster care, relying upon up-to-date empirical evidences.

Method

This research was based on a secondary analysis of "Identifying Stress Signals" questionnaires. These questionnaires are collected by the Ministry of Wealth from all associations providing foster services. They include the children's sociodemographic data and a description of their characteristics in each of the following five aspects: cognitive, motoric, physical, emotional and behavioral.

All questionnaires filed by the chosen association were rested, 319 in total. The study examined the children's characteristics as reported in two points in time for each child: at the time of placement at the foster family and either close to the end of the placement or the time of data collection for this study (January, 2016). It describes the children's characteristics in each of these two points in time, as well as the direction and magnitude of the changes between them. The study uses the foster care coordinators reports on the struggles of these children in these two points in time and calculates the magnitude of the change in each of the characteristics tested. Interaction tests were conducted as well in order to identify whether the different sociodemographic groups differ in their basic characteristics and in the magnitude of the changes throughout time.

Key Findings

Out of all children tested in this research, 61% were boys. 56% were non-orthodox Jews, about a third were orthodox Jews and only about 7% were Arabic. About a third of the test subjects were reported as being mentally retarded.

The aspect reported to have most severe difficulties was the cognitive aspect: a third of the children were reported to have a cognitive disorder on some level. A quarter of this children were reported to have motoric restlessness. Around 30% of the children were reported to display at least a low level of frustration.

As for the observed changes in each of the tested aspects, it seems that the children's characteristics underwent a positive change in all aspects, with the exception of the behavioral aspect, in which a negative, not statistically significant, change was noted. However, only in the physical aspect the positive change is statistically significant. Comparison between the different groups shows that, in general, girls perform better than boys, children with an intellectual disability perform better than children without such disability, and orthodox children perform better than non-orthodox children. The study also found that different age groups perform differently, such the performance of the youngest age group was higher than that of the two older groups. No such differences were detected for the direction or the magnitude of individual changes.

Discussion

This study is the first to be conducted in Israel and one of the few conducted worldwide on the characteristics of children in foster care and the changes in these characteristics during the time spent there. It is likely to contribute to the foster care policy and to the evidence-based practice.