The impact of targeted permanency and post-permanency services on continued family stability: an introduction

For over three decades federal child welfare policy has promoted three goals to achieve permanent outcomes for children: 1) making reasonable efforts to prevent out of home placement; 2) reunifying children from foster care with their parents; or, 3) promoting adoption if reunification is not feasible.

The Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 (Public Law 96–272) created the adoption assistance program to encourage finding permanent homes for children who were hard to place in adoptive homes, promoted prevention of out of home placement and reunification of foster children with their biological parents, and raised attention to the use of family preservation and reunification strategies (Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, 1985).

In 1993, Congress passed the Family Support and Family Preservation provisions of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 (P.L. 103–66). These efforts, later called Promoting Safe and Stable Families, provided funding for programs that seek to prevent out of home care and also support foster and adoptive families. States have used these funds to create programs to support reunification, to prevent reentry into care and to stabilize and support adoptive families.

The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997 (Public Law 105–89) reaffirmed that states are required to make reasonable efforts to preserve and reunify families (Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2020) and established “unequivocally that our national goals for children in the child welfare system are safety, permanency, and well-being.” (USDHHS, Administration for Children and Families, 1998, p. 1). In implementing ASFA, states continued to view reunification as a primary goal of foster care (USDHHS, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation, 2001). However, ASFA also created timeframes for the length of time children should be in care before pursuing termination of parental rights. And safety of children became a paramount goal. This encouraged concurrent planning, with agencies both working with families toward reunification and “the parallel pursuit of an alternative permanency goal (e.g., adoption) that would best serve the child in the event reunification fails” (Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2018).

Efforts toward finding permanent homes for children in the child welfare system were further promoted by the passage of the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008 (P.L. 110–351). Fostering Connections provides federal financing to provide payments to kinship care providers for eligible children who leave foster care for placement in legal guardianship, without termination of parental rights. This law also supported programs for states to create kinship navigator programs and strengthen efforts to find relatives to connect children in care with family members, that might speed permanency efforts.

Recently, the Families First Prevention Service Act of 2018 (FFPSA) provides financial assistance to states to fund evidence based services designed to prevent children from entering the foster care system (P.L.115–123). This focus on evidence based practices designed to reduce foster care entries and promote well-being offers tremendous opportunities to provide in-home training, mental health services, substance use treatment services to families in a structured manner that can be reimbursed through title IV-E of the Social Security Act.

Despite these pieces of legislation and the best intentions of the child welfare system, we know that some children in foster care will reenter foster care after reunification. We also know that some children who are adopted or achieve legal guardianship will end up back in the foster care system or other youth serving systems. These concerns raise important questions. One question is – are their characteristics of children, foster families, adoptive parents, guardians and birth families that make it more likely to achieve permanence? The second question, and one of particular concern to child welfare agencies is – What are effective and sustainable strategies and programs to achieve permanency (through reunification, guardianship or adoption)from foster care and to prevent reentry into care? And finally, are there programs and supports that can be provided once permanency has occurred in order to preserve children in their homes?

Numerous reports provide guidance on the types of programs that might be useful in achieving permanence, such as family therapy, parenting classes, treatment for substance use, respite care, parent support groups, and home visiting programs. Achieving permanence not only relates to specific programs, but it also includes caseworkers’ activities like safety checks and home visits, that occur in order to ensure that parents and other family members are participating in needed services and are making progress toward their case goals. Such services may occur both in pursuing reunification and in promoting adoption and guardianship. However, once permanence is achieved many of these programs and monitoring usually stop.

A search on “permanency” on the California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare (http://cebc4cw.org) identifies 53 programs, many of which relate to keeping families together prior to foster care placement. However, it is important to note that of the 53 programs, 23 were not able to be rated, and 21 are only considered to be promising practices. A search on “post permanency” finds one program that has been submitted and it was unable to be rated. A search on “permanence” only finds 2 programs and neither was able to be rated. A search on post-adoption finds one program and it was unable to be rated. This suggests that despite the more than 30 years of legislative mandates, there is much yet to be done to build the evidence-base of permanency and post-permanency interventions.

The use of aftercare services and targeted permanency services have been put forward as a means of decreasing poor post-permanency outcomes such as reentry into foster care or movement into other child serving systems such as the juvenile justice system. However, little empirical evidence can be found in the literature related to how successful these permanency and post-permanency services (in particular the use of trial home visits, continued post-permanency court ordered oversight, in-home or family preservation services, or other services provided once the foster care, out-of-home services are ending) are in decreasing reentry or movement into other child serving systems. Traditionally examinations of reentry are based on post-reunification analyses, and in some instances post-adoption, although recently there has been some work examining returns from guardianship as well.

This special issue of the Journal of Public Child Welfare on the “Impact of Targeted Permanency and Post-Permanency Services on Family Stability” sought manuscripts reporting on original studies that illustrate the use and implications of targeted permanency and post-permanency services related to overall child welfare management, decision making, and practice.

The articles included in this special issue examine permanency and post-permanency services through a number of different lenses. The first article examines the use of trial home visits while a child is in out-of-home care and whether or not these placements facilitate successful permanency (Shaw, 2021). Results, suggest that trial home visits are protective for children and families in reducing reentries especially for children with siblings also in care and are an integral part of reunification practice (Shaw, 2021). The remaining articles examine post-permanency structures and the risk of reengaging with foster care and came about through the Children’s Bureau funded Quality Improvement Center on Adoption and Guardianship. The second manuscript is an examination of the effects of the prevention program Tuning In to Teens (TINT) program, designed to work with families at risk of reentering foster care after adoption or guardianship (Rolock et al., 2021a). This study compares families receiving TINT services to those not receiving services to understand the overall effectiveness of the program. Next is an exploration of the risk factors for maltreatment after permanency through adoption (LaBrenz, Baiden, Faulkner, & Fong, 2021). Findings suggest that families may benefit from multiple services after permanency to lower the risk of subsequent substantiated maltreatment (LaBrenz et al., 2021). The next study discusses how to identify families who are at risk of system re-engagement after adoption (Rolock et al., 2021b). This manuscript examines how to utilize limited resources to serve families and suggests that the use of solely administrative data might be inadequate in identifying families in need (Rolock et al., 2021b). The final paper examines wellbeing factors related to caregiver commitment after permanency through adoption or guardianship (White et al., 2021). Results suggest that interventions targeting caregiver strain, caregiver nurturing/attachment and child behavior lead to greater caregiver commitment (White et al., 2021).

The manuscripts in this special issue all provide some information on the impact of targeted permanency and post-permanency services on family stability and how to identify families in need of these services. These manuscripts add to our knowledge base, however many of our questions remain unanswered related to specific strategies to prevent foster care reentry and adoption discontinuity. It is imperative that we expand our knowledge of the effectiveness of permanency and post-permanency services and identify those services that have a positive impact on post-permanency stability. The FFPSA provides an opportunity for the provision of services to families at risk of entering the foster care system (including children at risk of reentering the system). However, these services need to be evidence based. Our hope is that this special issue is a first step and that over the next several years researchers will work with their state partners to identify, evaluate, and disseminate information related to targeted permanency and post-permanency services as a means to increase family stability.