Out-of-home Placement and Permanency
All children and adolescents benefit from loving, supportive, and permanent relationships with caring adults as they develop. Research suggests that, when foster care placement is necessary, children and youth living with families experience better outcomes than those who live in group placements; these better outcomes are especially noticeable for children who are placed with kinship care families (e.g., grandparents raising grandchildren). Following removal from their family of origin, children may achieve permanency through various means, including reunification, guardianship, or adoption. In several ways, Child Trends’ team of child welfare researchers promotes the safety, permanency, and well-being of children who are placed in out-of-home care:
- We evaluate program and system reform efforts to strengthen reunification, foster care, guardianship/post-guardianship, and adoption/post-adoption services.
- We provide technical assistance to states seeking to enhance the services they provide for birth, foster, kinship, and adoptive families.
- We conduct research to build new knowledge about the placement and permanency experiences of children, youth, their families, and their caregivers
- We support states’ implementation of prevention services under the Family First Prevention Services Act.
