Complex Patterns: On the Characteristics of Children Who Experience High and Low Degrees of Foster-Care Drift

Abstract

A range of studies document the characteristics of children placed in out-of-home care, who experience many placement breakdowns and unhappy reunifications with their biological families. However, few of these studies have documented the characteristics of children who experience great overall placement instability—or complexity—throughout their entire period as minors. This study extends this small literature, by exploiting unique full-sample data, containing information on all placements, including their duration, experienced by children born between 1982 and 1987 in Denmark ( n = 15,814). The results show that children's background characteristics vary systematically with their probability of experiencing great placement complexity. More specifically, I find that children from families with relatively good socio-economic resources experience less complex placement courses compared to children from families with relatively poor resources.

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