Age and other risk factors related to reentry to care from kin guardian homes

Abstract

Although kinship guardianship is an increasingly important foster care exit pathway for children in the United States, research on the factors leading to kinship guardianship breakdown is lacking. This study examines the factors associated with guardianship breakdown for children who exited foster care to kinship guardianship in California between 2003 and 2010 (N = 18,831). Specifying time-dependent Cox relative risk models, children's age trajectories are directly accounted for in the analysis. This allows differentiation between duration dependence (i.e., time spent in guardianship) and children's development (expressed as age). Overall, 17.3% of children reentered care by 2017. Early adolescents, age 13-15 years (HR = 1.63, p < .001), and late adolescents, age 16-17 years (HR = 1.93, p < .001), had an increased hazard of reentry compared with children under the age of six. Children with a history of mental health concerns had more than twice the hazard of reentering than children without such a history (HR = 2.18, p < .001). Our findings indicate that transition to adolescence was associated with increased risk of reentry into care, highlighting the need for guardianship support services leading up to, and during, this child developmental stage.

Data on children reentering foster care from kinship guardianship

“…While a child's reentry to foster care represents the event of interest, a child's 18th birthday is interpreted as a censoring date. The calculated difference in days was then transformed into monthly intervals [1] .…”

“…Reentries : This variable contains the number of children who reentered to foster care during a particular period j . This count of guardianship discontinuities does not include positive reentries which either (i) maintained the guardianship with the same caregiver, (ii) resulted in adoption by the same caregiver or (iii) were caused by efforts towards reunification with a child's birth parents [1] . It is also important to note that only children's first reentry to foster care was considered, i.e., for children who had more than one episode of kinship guardianship only the first one was included in the data [1] .…”

“…Survival : The survivor function is estimated using the nonparametric estimator proposed by Kaplan and Meier [2] , which does not make adjustments for interval censoring. This assumption has been assessed in the appendix to the companion paper of this article [1] .…”

“…Summary statistics for the underlying cohort are presented in Table 1 . Additional details on the individual-level data and further analyses are presented in a companion article [1] and the corresponding supplementary material.…”

“…Raw data were then aggregated to generate life tables, summary statistics and estimates of survival functions and hazard rates. Experimental features Statistical analysis including nonparametric survival analyses Data source location California, USA Data accessibility All data is with this article Related research article Parolini et al [1] . …”