Kin-First Courtrooms: Research

The Importance of Kinship

Benefits of Kinship Placement

American Bar Association

Summary
This publication is a tool for lawyers that can be used when writing briefs or making oral arguments to the court in support of kinship placements. It includes research and cites that focus on the benefits of children being placed with relatives, including better outcomes in their mental health, reduced trauma, fewer behavior problems, better social outcomes, better educational stability and greater placement stability and permanency.

Every Kid Needs a Family Policy Report

Annie E. Casey Foundation

Summary
This publication tracks state-by-state the status of children in the United States. By providing policymakers and citizens with benchmarks of child wellbeing, KIDS COUNT seeks to enrich local, state and national discussions concerning ways to secure better futures for all children.

Every Kid Needs a Family: Attorney Advocacy Guide

Annie E. Casey Foundation

Summary
This publication is a companion document to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Giving Children in the Child Welfare System the Best Chance for Success, Kids Count policy report, May 2015. It provides a framework for attorneys’ advocacy efforts to keep youth in families and family settings and includes multi-disciplinary research and other resources and guides to draw on best practices for professionals in the child welfare field.

National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being

HHS Administration for Children & Families

Summary
This brief provides insight into how kinship caregivers help preserve family ties and provide children with a sense of family support, and how kinship care also saves society more than $6.5 billion each year in formal foster care costs. The study seeks to determine the needs of these kinship caregivers and how policy and practice can help meet their financial and other needs.

The Urgency of Placement with Relatives

National Association of Council for Children

Summary
This article includes the urgency of placing with relatives, a state-by-state comparison of relative placements, and strategies court systems can use to increase relative placements. It highlights the notion that best practice includes engaging relatives at the investigation process before the actual removal occurs. Further, judges must be prepared to hold the agency accountable for using due diligence in identifying and engaging relatives, and to insist that social worker reports contain information about relatives the social worker has contacted and their responses. Judges should inquire of social workers if they used family finding to locate and notice any absent parent and relatives and to use the ‘reasonable efforts’ finding/order to prevent removal and facilitate reunification.

Quality Hearings

Child Welfare Hearing Quality Research: What Legal Professionals Should Know

HHS Administration for Children & Families

Summary
This short brief includes activities and behaviors that are associated with high quality hearings. These include judicial inquiry and discussions of key topics, parental and child attendance at hearings, and meaningful engagement. It includes quality legal representation for parents and children as well.

Conceptual Model of Judicial Decision-Making and Hearing Quality in Child Welfare

HHS Administration for Children & Families

Summary
This brief presents a conceptual model that describes how judicial decision-making and hearing quality relate to case process and case outcomes for children and families. The model is meant to help researchers, practitioners and court decision-makers better understand the child welfare court process to provide practice improvements.

Family Finding

Evaluation of Los Angeles' Up-Front Family Finding Program

Child Trends

Summary
This brief provides insight into how kinship caregivers help preserve family ties and provides children with a sense of family support and how their care also saves society more than $6.5 billion each year in formal foster care costs. The study seeks to determine the needs of these kinship care providers and how policy and practice can help meet these financial and other needs.

Reasonable Efforts

Reasonable Efforts, A Judicial Perspective 2nd Edition

Judge Leonard Edwards (Ret.)

Summary
This 2nd edition highlights how for the first time in 40 years, the federal Health & Human Services is emphasizing the importance of reasonable efforts findings and is urging judges and attorneys to address this issue at court hearings. This publication addresses whether the reasonable efforts mandate applies to finding fathers and relatives, the federal relative placement preference required by the courts, and how relative placement can be dramatically increased by the use of upfront family finding. It concludes that the child welfare system should take aggressive steps to increase relative placements and that the judge must be prepared to hold the agency accountable by insisting that the agency use due diligence to identify and notice relatives and by using reasonable efforts to prevent removal and facilitate reunification tool.

Unlocking Reasonable Efforts, Kinship is Key

Journal of Poverty Law and Policy

Summary
This brief provides insight into how kinship caregivers help preserve family ties and provides children with a sense of family support and how their care also saves society more than $6.5 billion each year in formal foster care costs. The study seeks to determine the needs of these kinship care providers and how policy and practice can help meet these financial and other needs.

Engaging Fathers & Paternal Relatives

What about the Dads? Child Welfare Agencies’ Efforts to Identify, Locate and Involve Non-Resident Fathers

U.S. HHS Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation

Summary
This study documents that nonresident fathers of children in foster care are not often involved in case planning efforts and nearly half are never contacted by the child welfare agency during their child's stay in foster care. By not reaching out to fathers, caseworkers may overlook potential social connections and resources that could help to achieve permanency for the child. The ASPE Research Summary describes the findings of a study that sought to assess typical child welfare practice with respect to nonresident fathers of children in foster care. Engaging these fathers is important for the potential benefit of a child-father relationship (when such a relationship does not pose a risk to the child's safety or well-being), and also may be helpful in expediting permanent placement decisions and gaining access to resources for the child. g the reasonable efforts to prevent removal and facilitate reunification tool.

A Seat at the Table: Piloting Continuous Learning to Engage Fathers and Paternal Relatives in Child Welfare

U.S. HHS, Administration for Children & Families

Summary
This project highlights that research continues to link a father’s positive involvement in the family to outcomes that reflect children’s well-being, and when child welfare agencies successfully engage fathers in their children’s cases, the agencies create a connection that can also improve children’s outcomes. Relatively few studies have addressed the specific benefits of involving paternal relatives, but support from extended family is linked to children’s well-being. Even though involving fathers in child welfare services can have a positive impact on their children’s well-being and there is a deepening focus on parent engagement in child welfare, fathers are not well engaged in child welfare services. This project uses the Breakthrough Series Collaborative (BSC) to improve placement stability and permanency outcomes for children by engaging their fathers and paternal relatives, and includes promising practices and implementation strategies to help organizations improve this practice.

Resources for Relatives & Caregivers

Kinship Care and the Child Welfare System

Child Welfare Information Gateway

Summary
This factsheet was designed to help kin caregivers work effectively with the child welfare system. It also includes an overview of the research supporting the benefits of placement with relatives or kin, including links to those resources. Among the listed benefits are: minimizes trauma for youth, preserves cultural identity, increased placement stability, improves behavioral outcomes and promotes sibling ties.

Caregiver Notice and Right to Be Heard

Ohio Supreme Court

Summary
This toolkit is designed to provide an overview of the recommendations and best practices that courts may use to provide caregivers (kin, or non-relative) with notice and an opportunity to be heard at all hearings. It further provides the rationale behind this recommendation and other resources for the court’s reference. It recommends that local courts adopt rules to allow caregivers to provide meaningful information to the court. It also includes sample caregiver forms.

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Sign up here to receive e-mail updates about this project and even join a committee if you'd like. If you have any questions, please contact Alyse Almadani at alyse.almadani@kinnectohio.org.