Foster Care Essay -- Social Issues, Adoption and Safe Family Acta

There be too many children in cling to care. notwithstanding federal legislation (viz., the Adoption and Safe Family Act ASFA, among other legislative directives) designed to reduce the number of children in care, the U.S. Department of Health and piece Services (2010) indicates that of the 285,000 children exiting care in 2008, only 52 percent were reunified with their parents or primary caretakers. Although ASFA also has statutory guidelines designed to reduce the amount of judgment of conviction required for the administrations to decide permanent placement for children that have been removed from their parents, children exiting rear care in 2008 spent an average of 21.8 months in state manpower (U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services). These outcomes create several questions for researchers, two of which are pertinent to the current look at 1) What factors influence whether children are reunified with their families and 2) What factors influence the timeliness with which reunification occurs? Prior research has attempted to answer these questions by stress on demographic information such as age, race, education of parents and children (e.g., Courtney, 1994 Wulczyn, 2004), and income (e.g., Courtnety, 2004 Eamon, 2002) family makeup such as single parent propertys and number of adults in home (e.g., Davis, Landsverk, Newton, & Ganger, 1996 Harris & Courtney, 2003). One caveat to these examinations is that many of them look at factors like e.g., race, family composition, indigence they did not focus on the processes and/or structures of the juvenile dependency court system itself. The present study attempts to overcome this caveat by examining a process factorinvolvement of the parents and their respective legitimate representatives at archaean decision-m... ... obtains were not involved (Malm et al., 2008). Children whose non-resident fathers were highly involved also spent slight time in foster care (21.4 months) than children whose n on-resident fathers were not involved (25.3 months) (Malm et al.). notwithstanding previous research examining father involvement in services and wooing plan development, a paucity of research remains concerning the influence of father involvement in legal proceedings on dependency outcomes. Although whatever analysts (such as Edwards, 2009) suggest that including the father in dependency proceedings may lead to favorable outcomes for the child, including relative placement as opposed to foster care and possibly avoiding out-of-home placement altogether, these suggestions have not been empirically tested. This study examines association between fathers involvement in legal proceedings and reunification.