Professional Foster Care : A Future Worth Pursuing?

This article reports on a study comparing the performance of a professional foster care program and two specialized programs in Cook County, Illinois, with random samples of kinship and nonrelative family foster homes. 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. While the former two program types also do slightly better than the latter in achieving permanent living situations, the professional foster care program had difficulty moving children to adoptive homes or subsidized guardianship. Implications of these differences for the evolution of family foster care in the next century are considered. The professionalization of foster parenting is the latest trend in the evolution of family foster care. As more women enter the paid labor force, child-placing agencies are facing new difficulties in recruiting sufficient numbers of families willing to volunteer to become foster parents [Kahn & Kammerman 1990; U.S. General Accounting Office 1989]. The shortage is especially acute in central-city neighborhoods where the loss of a stable employment base and the declining presence of two-parent families have sharply reduced the supply of adults who can afford to care voluntarily for foster children at the prevailing boarding rates offered by public and private agencies [Chamberlain et al. 19921. Consequently, most family foster home vacancies are located in suburban communities far away from the central-city neighborhoods where the families of a majority of children in out-of-home care reside. The shortage of voluntary family foster homes and the spatial mismatch between placement needs and foster home supply are trends that are likely to intensify in the next century. Public policy appears to be evolving in two different directions to deal with these developments. The first consists of tapping into the natural altruism of kin to look after related children by adapting licensing standards and boarding rates to the particular circumstances of extended family care. Since the mid-1980s, kinship foster care has been the fastest growing component of formal foster care in the United States [Testa et al. 1996]. The second direction being taken involves paying foster parents for their labor, either indirectly by placing children in need of specialized foster care with them, or directly by hiring them as paid professional staff. Specialized foster care is the care of children with behavioral, developmental, emotional, or medical needs above and beyond those of average children in out-of-home care. Specialized foster caregivers typically receive a monthly board payment that is larger than that received by foster parents caring for children who do not fall into a special-needs category. Professional foster care, in the context of this paper, involves trained, professional foster parents who are paid an annual salary for foster parenting above and beyond any board payments made by the state on behalf of the children; most of them care for children with special needs. The movement toward specialized and professional foster care has been accelerating since the early 1990s [Barth et al. 1994]. Both strategies for dealing with the dual problems of foster home shortage and the spatial mismatch between need and supply are bringing to the surface long-standing controversies over the appropriate balance between family altruism and monetary incentives as motives for becoming foster parents [Zelizer 1985]. On the one hand, critics of kinship foster care are raising warning flags about kinship care's subverting the aims of welfare reform by becoming an "Aid to Relatives with Dependent Children" program [Charen 1997]. On the other hand, critics of professional foster care are voicing concerns about robbing family foster care of the essential qualities of family life-informality, spontaneity, and unconditionality [Lemay 1991]. …