Professional Foster Care

Abstract

Professional and kinship foster care consistently outperformed the specialized programs and the nonrelative care in terms of stability, sibling placement, restrictiveness of care, and proximity to the child's community of origin. The movement toward specialized and professional foster care has been accelerating since the early 1990s. As with changes in family foster care, the movement toward specialized and professional forms of care parallels changes in other spheres of domestic life. Both the Professional Foster Care and Urban Foster Care programs do significantly better than regular family foster care programs in placing children nearest to the neighborhoods of their biological parents. Too often the trauma children experience at their separation from their biological parents is compounded by their repeated movement while in care from home to home. By assessing how specialized and professional foster care compare with kinship and nonrelative family foster care, additional insight can be obtained on the extent to which professional foster care is a future worth pursuing.

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