The Annie E. Casey Foundation
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Pennsylvania

Statistics on children, youth and families in Pennsylvania from the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children

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Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children

Change Indicator

Foster Care - Placement setting stability during reporting period in Pennsylvania

Foster Care - Placement setting stability during reporting period

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Note: Non-consecutive years appear adjacent in the trend line
because one or more years have been deselected.

Why This Indicator Matters

Foster care, also known as out-of-home care, is a court-monitored process that involves removing children from their families following a substantiated report of abuse or neglect. [1] All child maltreatment reports are investigated by either Child Protective Services (CPS) or General Protective Services (GPS), depending on the nature of the referral, to determine the child’s safety within the household as well as the level of risk for future harm.[2] Children are typically only placed in foster care after family preservation and in-home services fail to improve their safety and well-being in the home. Out-of-home placement is often viewed as temporary, as achieving and maintaining permanency is always the primary priority of child welfare agencies, whether that be in the form of reunification with their caregivers or finding new homes with relatives or adoptive families.[3] Family issues with substance use, mental illness, or domestic abuse are among the most common factors that lead to children entering the foster care system.[4]

By examining foster care placement setting stability, researchers are able to track longitudinal changes associated with placement permanency and infer what the foster care experience typically looks like for children in the system in terms of number of placements. As shown in the following table, placement stability has steadily increased over the past decade in Pennsylvania. There has been a shift by over 10% since 2011 in which unstable placement (defined as 3 or more placement settings) has declined with the rise of stable placement (defined as 2 or fewer placement settings). This change fortunately suggests that out-of-home placement settings are generally becoming more permanent over time in Pennsylvania. Children in the child welfare system can experience a great amount of instability in out-of-home placement, and certain characteristics such as age, race, and mental health status have been found to impact the likelihood of placement permanency.[5] Because placement instability has been linked to numerous adverse child outcomes, including disrupted development, behavioral problems, social ineptitudes, poor academic achievement, negative self-esteem, and increased distrust of caregivers, considerable child welfare policy has focused on reducing placement instability.[6]

[1] Child Welfare Information Gateway. (2023). Overview: Out-of-Home Care. United States Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Children's Bureau. https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/outofhome/overview/

[2] Rizvi, M. B., Conners, G. P., King, K. C., Lopez, R. A., & Rabiner, J. (2022). Pennsylvania Child Abuse Recognition and Reporting. In StatPearls. StatPearls Publishing. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33351411/

[3] Child Welfare Information Gateway. (2023). Achieving & Maintaining Permanency. United States Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Children's Bureau. https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/permanency/

[4] Child Welfare Information Gateway. (2023). Achieving & Maintaining Permanency. United States Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Children's Bureau. https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/permanency/

[5] Lockwood, K. K., Friedman, S., & Christian, C. W. (2015). Permanency and the Foster Care System. Current Problems in Pediatric and Adolescent Health Care, 45(10), 306-315. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cppeds.2015.08.005

[6] Konijn, C., Admiraal, S., Baart, J., Van Rooij, F., Stams, G.J., Colonnesi, C., Lindauer, R. & Assink, M. (2019). Foster Care Placement Instability: A Meta-Analytic Review. Children and Youth Services Review, 96, 483-499. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2018.12.002

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Definition and Source

PROVIDER

Definition

Children in out-of-home placement between 12 to 24 months by the number of placement settings for the current episode.

Data Source

PPC analysis of AFCARS longitudinal file produced by Public Consulting Group for Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, Office of Children, Youth and Families.

Notes

Some county-level data is also not available for certain years.

S = Suppressed.  Statistics (rates, ratios, percents) are not calculated and displayed for counts less than 10 (or less than 3 for Bayesian/Nearest Neighbor rates). This is due to the unreliability of statistics based on small numbers of events.

Last Updated

May 2024