How Long Do States Let Children in Foster Care Wait for Permanent Families? Timely Permanency Report Cards

Key Points

States are responsible for finding safe, permanent families for children in foster care, through reunification with the family of origin, adoption, guardianship, or other custodial arrangements with relatives.
Permanency is a crucial developmental need for children in foster care, but the likelihood of exiting to permanency depends heavily on where they live.
A new website hosted by AEI based on the analysis provided in this report allows the public to view and compare states’ performance on timely permanency metrics, overall and by age and race or ethnicity.

Executive Summary

Children need safe and permanent families for healthy development. Therefore, states are tasked with moving children in foster care to permanency through reunification with the family of origin, adoption, guardianship, or other custodial arrangements with relatives. Federal laws that guide states emphasize timely permanency, but states exercise substantial discretion in implementation.

This report summarizes a new analysis of states’ performance on four permanency measures—overall, by the child’s age at entry, and by race or ethnicity. Performance across measures is summarized by an overall ranking, from 1 to 51. Complete project results are available at www.aei.org/foster-care-report-card. The analysis demonstrates that children’s chances of permanency, especially through adoption, depend largely on where they live.

Introduction

Each year, over half a million US children experience foster care.¹ Foster care is a temporary arrangement that is used when children cannot remain safely in their parents’ care due to abuse, neglect, parental incapacity, abandonment, or other threatening circumstances. Once children are in foster care, states are responsible for permanency. This means that states first attempt to help the child’s parents address the factors leading to loss of custody so that the child can safely go home. If those efforts are unsuccessful, the state finds a safe and appropriate permanent home for the child through adoption or guardianship.

Without permanency, children have no legally or socially recognized family and can be uprooted at any time, with little warning. Children are deprived of the certainty of knowing where and to whom they belong, and this uncertainty inhibits the development of healthy relationships and discourages planning for the future.² Minimizing the duration of uncertainty by providing timely permanency is among the most important functions of the child welfare system.

Unlike in much of Europe and Asia,³ the formal policies of the US reject the idea that staying in foster care until adulthood—regardless of whether it is family-based or institutional care and regardless of children’s age, race or ethnicity, or disability status—is a solution for children who cannot be raised safely by their families of origin. Thus, permanency has been a federal goal and expectation of foster care systems since at least 1980.

However, it soon became apparent that agencies would routinely spend numerous years in pursuit of reunification when parents were unengaged and making no progress and that those years of uncertainty take a massive psychological toll on children. In 1997, a bipartisan coalition passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA),⁴ which maintained a strong preference for reunification but sought to make sure that states were not delaying consideration of adoption for children when reunification was clearly inappropriate or unlikely to be successful. ASFA caps the amount of time agencies and parents have to achieve reunification by instructing states to file for termination of parental rights (TPR) after a child has spent 15 of the prior 22 months in foster care. It allows states to bypass reunification efforts when “aggravated circumstances” apply. ASFA requires permanency plans to be reviewed biannually in court.

In the 25 years since ASFA was enacted, some states have committed to moving children to permanency as quickly as is safe and feasible, while others continue to let children languish in foster care for years on end.⁵ ASFA enforcement is largely toothless, as the federal government is loath to impose financial penalties (withholding of funds) that may affect the care of vulnerable children. Thus, ASFA compliance depends largely on the state government, where the legislature can craft more detailed policies for implementation and the executive branch can determine the leadership for child welfare.

Of note, agencies’ ASFA compliance alone is not sufficient to achieve timely permanency. Agencies can only petition for TPR, adoption, or guardianship. Execution of ASFA’s goals requires that family courts are functional (able to schedule and hold hearings on time) and committed to permanency for children.

Read the full report.

Notes

1. US Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth, and Families, “The AFCARS Report,” June 28, 2022, https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cb/afcars-report-29.pdf.

2. Sarah A. Font and Lindsey Palmer, “Timely Permanency for Children in Foster Care: Revisiting Core Assumptions About Children’s Options and Outcomes,” Court Review 58 (2022): 26–32, https://amjudges.org/publications/courtrv/cr58-1/CR58-1Font.pdf.

3. Tarja Pösö, Marit Skivenes, and June Thoburn, Adoption from Care: International Perspectives on Children’s Rights, Family Preservation and State Intervention (Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press, 2021), https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1n1brv7.

4. Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, Pub. L. No. 105-89.

5. US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, “Freeing Children for Adoption Within the Adoption and Safe Families Act Timeline,” February 11, 2021, https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/freeing-childrenadoption-within-adoption-safe-families-act-timeline.