Foster care adversely affects children in both the short term and the long term, new research from Sweden confirms.
Written by Christian Munthe, a bioethics professor at Gothenburg University, and eight additional researchers, the paper also calls on social care organisations around the world to systematically collect data about the effects and side effects of out-of-home placements for children.
The paper pulls together a substantial amount of research from Europe (including England) and the United States, in order to try to take a long term view of foster care and its impact on children.
The conclusions the researchers come to in the paper are damning.
Overall, 28 publications about 18 interventions, including 5,357 children, were identified, but only three interventions were sufficiently evidence-based.
Alarmingly, they also found that not one study had assessed the tools used for foster parent selection, or had evaluated pre-service programs related to outcomes.
They also discovered that hardly any study concluded that young adults who had grown up in foster care had better outcomes when compared to peers raised in ‘adverse’ birth family environments.
Of those studies attempting to establish causal effects, the long-term developmental effects of out-of-home care seemed to be neutral at best.
Analysis of foster care and its effect on children is severely limited, so it’s no surprise that the researchers chose to highlight the need to address this lack of evidence in their paper.
The study looked at four central questions:
- Are there instruments for foster parent selection that promote the children’s health and adaptive behaviour?
- Are there pre-service training programs targeting foster parents that promote children’s health and adaptive behaviour?
- Are there interventions targeting foster children and foster parents that promote children’s health and adaptive behaviour?
- Does foster care intervention in general promote children’s health and adaptive behaviour?
- What ethical challenges arise due to the state of the evidence base with regard to the Questions 1–4?
Researching Reform 
Abolish foster care that is opposed by the parent(s). It is or should be criminal !
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Yes and Adoption.
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Studies can be a good thing. if they actually ever change things but unfortunately they usually dont.
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My grandchildren have been emotionally abused social services taking them from us,putting them into foster care with strangers for 18months and now moved to more strangers that are a gay couple that have applied to adopt them after having them 10weeks..??? Those kids are damaged because of their opinions of POSSIBLE FUTURE HARM by their family that’s normal,no criminal records,no drugs,no drinking etc its killing me,I miss them so much.
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IT is a vast money making child trafiking industry !
https://www.theguardian.com/amp/remote.html?1512677960104
Residential care does not come cheap. The filmmakers confirmed with Cambian Group that one home that employed their undercover reporter charges £4,800 a week per child. A Keys home that features in the film charged a council £5,100 a week per child
Child protection
THE GUARDIAN JUNE 21 2018
Profit drives the UK child protection industry
Social workers escorted by police take terrified children from their mothers every day, write Nina Lopez Jones , Anne Neale and Kim Sparrow , many going into the 80% of children’s homes and 40% of foster care that have been privatised
Child with carer
‘Thus the “corporate parent” is paid vast sums to replace the impoverished mother (86% of austerity cuts have fallen on women).’ Photograph: Blend Images/Alamy
There is widespread condemnation (Letters, 20 June) at Trump separating immigrant children from their families. But in the UK, away from the public gaze, social workers escorted by police take terrified children from their mothers every day. Louise Tickle urges a “complete reset of attitudes in children’s social care away from removing children and towards supporting families” (Opinion, 15 June).
What drives social workers to prioritise taking children on such heartbreakingly spurious grounds? The practice follows the money. Tickle says that “half of the country’s entire public spending on children is going on those 73,000 children [in care]”. But she doesn’t say that 80% of children’s homes and 40% of foster care have been privatised. Thus millions are spent on feeding an increasingly privatised and growing child protection industry: over £2,000 a week for each child in institutional care; at least £450 for foster care.
The law offers a humane alternative. Section 17 of the Children Act 1989 instructs local authorities to provide support, including financial, to families so they can stay together; the Care Act 2014 entitles disabled mothers to extra help. But these provisions are hardly ever applied. Thus the “corporate parent” is paid vast sums to replace the impoverished mother (86% of austerity cuts have fallen on women). The way the law is implemented is an abuse of power and must be stopped.
Nina Lopez Jones Support Not Separation Coalition, Anne Neale Legal Action for Women, Kim Sparrow Single Mothers’ Self-Defence
Fostering children is big business
CHRISTOPHER BOOKER THE TELEGRAPH
Most people would be startled to learn how much of the child protection sector is now dominated by a handful of companies, most of them run by ex-social workers. These companies are paid huge sums by local authorities to make their fostering arrangements. Several have become such big business that they are traded by private equity funds.
A meticulously researched survey by the Corporate Watch website has tracked down the financial details of the seven largest of these companies.The biggest, Foster Care Associates, is still largely owned by two former foster carers, through a holding company which in 2013 paid its shareholders £9.2 million. In 2014, on an income of £127 million, it paid its owners £7 million, and its highest paid director earned in salary and other benefits £406,000.
The National Fostering Agency (NFA), founded by two social workers, was sold in 2012 for £130 million to a private investment firm owned by an array of bankers and accountants, which also owned a chain of steak restaurants and the Groucho Club. In 2015, the NFA was sold on again to another private equity firm. The price was not disclosed, but the first private equity firm announced that it had “more than doubled” its original investment, suggesting that the NFA had been sold for more than £250 million. Income from foster care was shown in the NFA’s 2014 accounts as £94 million, with the owners receiving £14.4 million and the highest paid director £318,112.In some ways, the oddest of all the fostering companies analysed by Corporate Watch is Acorn Care, owned by the Ontario Teachers Pension fund. This organisation in 2014 had revenues of £73 million, although only 65 per cent of this appears to be for foster care. This firm, the accounts show, has so far yielded those Canadian teachers a profit of £47 million.
However what we must realise is that if the Family Courts stopped putting thousands of children into fostercare and many hundreds of babies into forced adoption all those cushy jobs for lawyers,judges, and social workers would dry up and all those profits for equity companies would vanish so don’t expect any changes too soon !
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