Who disrupts from placement in foster and kinship care?

To identify reliable, inexpensive predictors of foster care placement disruption that could be used to assess risk of placement failure.

Using the Parent Daily Report Checklist (PDR), foster or kinship parents of 246 children (5-12 years old) in California were interviewed three times about whether or not their foster child engaged in any of the 30 problem behaviors during the previous 24 h. PDR was conducted during telephone contacts (5-10 min each) that occurred from 1 to 3 days apart at baseline. Disruptions were tracked for the subsequent 12 months. Other potential predictors of disruption were examined, including the child's age, gender, and ethnicity, the foster parent's ethnicity, the number of other children in the foster home, and the type of placement (kin or non-kin).

Foster/kin parents reported an average of 5.77 child problems per day on the PDR checklist. The number of problem behaviors was linearly related to the child's risk of placement disruption during the subsequent year. The threshold for the number of problem behaviors per day that foster and kinship parents tolerated without increased risk of placement disruption for these latency-aged children was 6 or fewer. Children in non-kin placements were more likely to disrupt than those in kinship placements. There was a trend for increased risk of disruption as the number of children in the home increased.

The PDR Checklist may be useful in predicting which placements are at most risk of future disruption, allowing for targeted services and supports.