Siblings Divided at Home and Foster Care

Teresa Huizar: Hi, I’m Teresa Huizar, your host of One in Ten.  In today’s episode, Siblings Divided at Home and Foster Care. I speak with Dr. Dylan Jones, postdoctoral fellow at Penn State University. Now, over the years, needed attention has been given to what happens when a sibling group is removed from the home and placed in foster care, the way in which sibling bonds can be strained, and what can be done to support them. But until now, far less attention has been paid to those circumstances in which some kids are left in the home and some are placed in foster care.  How common is that? What do we know about why some children would be placed and some not?

What impact does that have on the kids at home and those that are out of the home and foster care,  and most importantly, how does this effect the trajectory and outcome of all the kids in the case.  I know you’ll be as interested in this emerging research as I was. Please take a listen.

Hi Dylan. Welcome to One in Ten.

 

Dylan Jones: My pleasure to be here.

 

TH: So how did you first get interested in exploring the topic of what happens with siblings in foster care? Those who, some part of the group is placed elsewhere and part of the sibling group is at home still.

 

DJ: Yeah, so I think when we talk about sibling separation in foster care, the typical example is when all kids are placed and they’re all removed from the home and then they’re not all put in the same foster home.

You know, so for instance, popular legislation around that is the Fostering Connections Act of 2008, and that only stipulates about that case. When all kids are removed, what happens? It’s a reasonable efforts to place at the same home. If that doesn’t happen, we need to make sure that there’s sibling visitation going on.

So. For me going into this, I sort of had never really heard of instances, anecdotes when it was the case when a sibling group was split because not all kids were removed. Just some of those kids were removed. I had heard of sibling groups being split around issues around adoption, but I think it was just a question that I had in the back of my mind and I was unsure how often it was and if there were sort of ramifications around that.

 

TH: So our listeners are child abuse professionals, but at differing levels of experience. Talk a little bit about what the reasons would be, why some kids in a sibling group would be placed outside the home, while others would be retained in the home, and then how common that is.

 

DJ: You know, I think there’s probably four general scenarios where this might be the case.

One would be that all kids at the home are not subject to same maltreatment or abuse or neglect. So you know, around the literature you might hear of a term scapegoating. So one kid in the house is the scapegoat and is uniquely targeted for abuse or neglect. Common example I sort of think is the movie Matilda in the 90s sort of  plays that out a little bit.

Another reason would be all kids in the house, they don’t all have the same vulnerability to that maltreatment, you know, let’s say there’s an infant and maybe the other kids are older teenagers.  You know, neglect might represent a particular threat to the safety of that infant, while it won’t perhaps affect the wellbeing of the other kids, but in terms of the immediate safety, I think that that could be. A third reason is it could be the case that not all the kids in the house have the same parents.

So might be the case that some kids have different dads and when CPS comes in, they’re able to find a dad for some of the kids, but not for others. So it could be the case that all kids are in fact removed from the home, but they’re not all formally placed in foster care.  Now, unfortunately, this is an issue, it’s hard for us to observe because unless they get that formal entry into state custody, we don’t observe them as really from our perspectives as people who look at the child welfare system.

Then lastly, it could be the case where you have an issue of voluntary relinquishment. So maybe there’s an older youth with serious behavioral health issues or perhaps medical needs that the caregiver is unable to provide for, and they will voluntarily place that youth at distinct custody while the other children may not present on those needs.

 

TH: So you’ve talked about four categories of things that can kind of come up and that might result in this. Is this extremely rare? Is it extremely common? Just how frequently does this occur where you have some kids in the home and other placements, whether those are kinship care or foster care or something else?

 

DJ: Yeah, so to me it’s just one of the bigger takeaways was that it was way more common than I had suspected. So 25% of the time where you have a sibling group where at least one kid is removed, not all kids are removed.  So that’s sort of our lower bound estimate. We usually think of foster care placement as this caregiver level sort of need, right?

And so it suggests that that’s just simply not always the case. It is not uncommon at all for these sibling groups to be split through saying in the paper where there’s this partial sibling group removal, right? Some kids go to foster care and some kids stay at home.

 

TH: Now while your paper dealt with other things, which we’ll get into in a moment.

You just alluded to something a minute ago that I wanna ask about, because I remember in 2008 when the law was passed and signed into law that required all the kids were placed from a sibling group, that they had to have visits with each other if they were not all placed together.  They had to make reasonable efforts to place them together, those kinds of things.

And one of the side comments you made is, but that doesn’t apply if some are in the home and some are outside the home. Was it, did I understand that correctly?

 

DJ: If you look up the law, it’s just referencing all youth who are removed. So I’m certainly not legal expert here, but it could be the case that kids who are left in the home while their siblings are gone, there is not the same sort of federal oversight or regulatory processes that would grant them the same rights of sibling visitations than kids who are all removed.

 

TH: That’s fascinating. I had never picked up on that until you said it.  Just right now, as you say, it’s really a gap in the law, and especially given the importance of sibling contact with each other.

But let’s turn to your study for a moment. It seems to me that because of this gap in their literature, really you were looking at some very fundamental questions, just trying to explore what do we know about these kids? And so you looked at NCAN’s data over a period of three years and you had a series of questions that you were looking at.

And so can you just tell the listeners what specifically were you hoping to find out?

 

DJ: Yeah, so we sort of went in with three questions. First was, how often is it happening? So we observe a CPS report  and there’s more than one kid named on it. How often is it happening when one kid gets removed? Not all kids are getting removed.

That’s our first question, and that happens about 25% of the time when at least one kid gets removed. Secondly, we dig into how those groups that we term split, how are they different than sibling groups who are all removed versus sibling groups who are never removed? Sibling group level sort of measures, and also the individual children themselves.

And then third, we wanted to look at what happens when about those kids who are left in the home, but their siblings are removed, you know, are they safe? Are they going to go to foster care eventually? Maybe they just weren’t initially removed, conditional on that one index report that we saw,  and so those three questions were the major focuses of the paper.

 

TH: Well, we got ahead of ourselves a little bit earlier ’cause I was so eager to dig in and already covered the first question a little bit. But let’s talk about what you call in the paper split home group where some kids are in the home and some kids are out of the home.  I’m curious about what you thought you might find about those kids.

What you did find about whether there were any differences and what those differences actually were?

 

DJ: Yeah, so the youth who are left in the home, whose siblings were removed,  so we call those kids, these split home kids, if they’re in a split group, but they’re left at home, sort of depends who you compare them to when, when you compare them to their siblings who were removed, they tend to be older.

They’re less likely to have their allegations of maltreatment substantiated.  However, though they still had high rates of substantiation, so it’s not as though they were just uniformly, you know, not being maltreated compared to youth and sibling groups were known, was removed.  Their rates of substantiation were way higher.

Even though they themselves were not removed. So in a lot of other respects there weren’t a lot of differences when we looked at these youth characteristics, that was a surprise too, in some respects, larger set of questions that, that maybe we need to probe further on.

 

TH: Yeah, I just, even as you were saying that, I was thinking several things.

So one, is your takeaway from that because the kids left in the home in these sibling groups where I know for our listeners is a little confusing. Just take it the largely, we’re gonna be talking about sibling groups, of which some are in the home and some are not.  So in those that were left in the home in that condition.

Was age the defining difference? I mean, if substantiation rates really wasn’t, was it just that these are older kids, so even though there had been a substantiation, there was a feeling like they were less vulnerable or less likely to be at imminent risk of physical harm or something else? Like what do you think that’s about?

 

DJ: So I think that when we compare them to their siblings who were removed, they’re older. So I think a mix of two things. One is they’re older, so perhaps less vulnerable,  and also less likely to have substantiated maltreatment when we compare them to their siblings who were placed.  So when we go back to the first question, are these sort of four reasons that might yield a sibling group to be split?

Right. They can have different experiences of maltreatment, different vulnerabilities.  I think we find it’s a mix of both and probably depends on factors we might not be able to observe. But I, I would say we find general evidence of both of those instances happening.

 

TH: Now in the sort of third research question that you had, you really looked at these non placed siblings.

You were wanting basically to know if kids left in the home. In that situation, were they at greater risk for re-report?  During specific windows. I think one of them was what, 30 days? And then you looked at a later period too. And then any future out-of-home placement. So am I characterizing this correctly to say that one of the things that you wanted to know is, okay, we’re just keeping some of these kids in the home, but are they just bouncing right out shortly thereafter?

So after the initial report, but we haven’t solved anything by keeping them home initially because they’re gonna wind right at back and out of home placement. Is that what you were look, trying to get at?

 

DJ: Yeah, I think so. But yeah, maybe these instances where the case planning was sort of lapsed, where, you know, they should have just been removed from the get go.

 

TH: Let’s start with the re-reports first, because I think it’s kind of interesting the difference between the two. What did you find? ’cause it’s a little bit complicated actually, I think what you found on re-report, so share it with our listeners.

 

DJ: Absolutely.  So for youth left in the home.  For the first 30 days, they are at increased risk of repeated maltreatment when we compare them to kids whose siblings were removed and were also left in the home.

That changes though after 30 days, I think six months or more. Six months, yeah. They get then lower risk.  And so you got this, the sort of signs change the direction of this effect that we’re trying to get at, which is always weird, and we have some hypotheses of why that might be happening.  Unfortunately, we’re unable to strictly test them though.

So in some respects are hypotheses of why that’s happening.

 

TH: Well, I’m gonna ask you to speculate a little bit because in future study, maybe you’ll look at that. But okay, so let’s take that initial period. It’s probably not surprising to people who are listeners ’cause they’re child abuse professionals, that there would be some kids who would be left in the home.

And the conditions would not have changed much. You know what I mean? And so maybe there’s a repeat episode of physical abuse or neglect, and that gives rise to reports. I’m more curious about the six month kind of inverse relationship and what do you think is happening in the home where if six months go by and they’ve been in the home,  they’re much less likely to have a re-report?

Our listeners understand we’re just speculating. I’m asking you, you’re a learned opinion here.

 

DJ: So, you know, foster care, perhaps at least from the perspective of child welfare assisted professionals, perhaps that, that the service you caregiver gets their kid removed. And particularly for reunification, the caregiver is sort of, we require them to go through some services, to get their, some of the kids back in their care, so drug counseling, et cetera. So it could be the case that experience in the foster care system on behalf of the caregivers, right? The caregivers being experiencing.

 

TH: Yeah. That, that’s the constant, right? Yeah.

 

DJ: Yeah. You know, creates some stability in their care and perhaps ameliorate some sort of, some of the crises that led to initial maltreatment.

So.  I guess I never really thought about it this way, but it seemed as though that those kids left at home almost benefited in the long term from their siblings getting removed. Only in terms of that one repeat maltreatment measure.

 

TH: I was gonna say, this was a hot take, right?

 

DJ: Yeah. So very much just in terms of, you know, our one little outcome of re-report. Yeah.  It’s an infinitely complicated situation.  Exactly.

 

TH: With all the caveats.

 

DJ: Whole bunch of caveats, please. Yeah.

 

TH: Yeah. Whole bunch. But I think there is something setting maybe that aside, there is something I think a little bit hopeful about the fact that all of the things that happen in these cases, in that six-month period, because a lot of services are front loaded. Maybe some of it actually helps you know that that’s one possible interpretation of the results you’re seeing is that a parent, as you say, required to go to substance abuse treatment, or maybe they have to have some kind of other intervention in the way they’re disciplining their kids so that it’s not abusive, or maybe they’re basic needs are being better met because now the system is aware and helping them access food, housing, clothing, whatever it is. And so it’s interesting to think about, not because we think like foster care is so great or anything like that, but just that I think we do worry all the time, obviously about the impact of that and assume the kids who are left in the home may just be better off and I think what you’ve painted is a much more complex picture in that equation, maybe.

 

DJ: Yeah. I think there, there’s a whole bunch of ways we can measure wellbeing. The kids left at home, re-report is one, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t getting maltreated, but maybe it’s not reported. There’s all sorts of things we’re not observing.

It could also be the case that, so when, sorry, we’re gonna go to the beginning.  We were talking about reasons why a sibling group could get split. Some kids go to foster care some kids don’t.  We are assuming, and this is a limitation of the study.  That those kids that we’re assuming didn’t go to foster care because there’s no record of them formally entering state care.

They could have been removed from the house and put in another household.

 

TH: Oh, that’s interesting. Kind of an informal rehoming. Oh, interesting. Okay.

 

DJ: And we don’t very little about that stuff right now in the literature. Yeah. It’s hard to.

 

TH: It’s hard to track ’cause you’re not necessarily aware of it.

Right. And I think that folks who are listeners who have done casework or worked in cases are well aware that there are times when there was a placement with an aunt or whatever and suddenly grandma has the kids or mom had the kids, but actually Grandma’s doing a lot of care taking of the kids or these kinds of things just informally.

Let’s talk about future out-of-home placement though. This was another one where the data was a little bit complex for these non placed siblings.  So what did that look like?

 

DJ: Yeah, so when we started define these split groups, so if a sibling group is split or not, that’s just at a point in time. It could be the case that in fact, all of the kids did.

It just didn’t happen. It’s not like it wasn’t necessarily the case that they were never moved. Those kids left at home and we find that to be happening a fair amount. So in that first initial 30 days, those kids were left at home, in split group way more likely to get removed than kids left at home, but their siblings are also left at home that that increased probability drops off real quick.

After 30 days, it’s like 20 times as likely than, and then 30 days to six months, it’s like twice and then that they’re actually less likely to in the long run. And that could be the case of that finding with regards to if they’re placed in the long term or not, may be similar to what we found in the re-report, is if they get re-reported in the long term or not,  that after a while, perhaps due to whatever family level services are happening, you know, perhaps they’re less likely to become re-involved in the child welfare system.

 

TH: We don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s interesting to think about all the things that could make that be the case. You know, one of the questions that child welfare is struggling right now with is weighing all the factors, obviously about the pros and cons of foster care for any given kid and leaving them in the home.

And so much of that, I think discourse has been around the probability of future abuse. And one of the things I was thinking about, in reading your paper is that that first 30 day window is really a critical period for those kids that are left in the home. ’cause you see this big spike, right? And then the rapid drop off.

So I’m wondering what you think this sort of the practice implications are for the average caseworkers sitting out there and they’ve hung with us through all the research so far.  What do you think the sort of practical implications are of this for someone who’s got one of these family groups right in front of them, they have a sibling group, they’re trying to decide what to do with, they have a case plan that they’re trying to write up and get the court to agree to. What does this point them to knowing this is just one study among many others?

 

DJ: Sure. I certainly can’t speak to the best case planning practices in all these different scenarios.

You know, I think one thing is, it’s sort of a reminder that when abuse happens, and it’s often a sort of crisis, it’s not some sort of a state that occurs. And then when it occurs, it’s critical, and perhaps it isn’t temporary.  We’re responding to crises, not permanent states of families. But I don’t have a great answer in terms of…

 

TH: No magic answers.

We, sorry, I’m just asking you to speculate, so I totally get that. Yeah, no.

 

DJ: You know, this study is, in some respects, it opens up a bunch more questions and answers. I think in order to drill down on real specific takeaways for case planning. We need to measure things that we just don’t have in that data.

 

TH: Yeah, so that, but you raise a good point. So for you, when you finished this, what research questions were still very clearly outstanding to you where you thought, okay, we’ve laid some interesting foundational data, but let’s just say the money to do another study dropped outta the sky on us. What would be the next sort of building block to build on, the next set of questions that logically come to mind based on this?

 

DJ: We need to know why the group was split, you know, so sort of going back to one of those four situations and then there might be more, and I’m sure we can think of more. That’s sort of is, that’s the crux of, you know, what we need to establish before we can really ask other research questions.

We’re sort of some respects, operating in the dark, you know, because if it’s the case that’s a kid is being scapegoated,  that they’re the one that’s being subject to maltreatment, perhaps the siblings are maybe contributing to it.  And maybe it’s good that kid is not living with their siblings anymore.

If it’s just the case of one child is an infant, highly vulnerable.  Other youth, maybe they’re older, they’re not, I mean, I think that’s its own sort of implications for case planning. So I would measure that. What was the rationale on the case planning for that case planner?  You know, why, why did that occur?

 

TH: Do you know any, and I just really honestly don’t know myself, but do you know any state or for those systems that are county based, that actually track that level of decision making? So when we talk about a potential study and needing a billion dollars for is probably ’cause coding that and trying to do that manually would be a yeoman’s job.

 

DJ: Yeah.  A lot. It would take a billion dollars.

 

TH: Yeah. Do you know anyone who’s currently looking at this or tracking it?

 

DJ: I don’t. The only other sort of place in policy where I have seen these instances of these split groups come up where some kids left in the house, some kids are placed, is in some of these Family First Prevention Service Act state plans.

So each of those state, in order to use Title IV funding, which is normally for foster care, in order to use it for, preventing foster care. I apologize if I’m being redundant here. So each state needs to submit a plan to the federal government saying, this is what we’re gonna use the money for, these Title IV funds, and a lot of these states, they have to define a candidate population.  So we’re not just gonna spend a willy nilly on whoever may or may not go to foster care. We’re gonna target these kids. And one of those criteria are kids whose siblings are in foster care.  And so I think in the paper we referenced some of these states from like Connecticut, California, maybe Kentucky was in there.

Other states might be doing that. So those states may be, you know, certainly  in order to design policies to prevent those siblings from being placed, we would need to know what the circumstances were that led to them being split in the first case.  So those states implementing these FFPSA, these family first plans that I think it’s, it’s sort of ongoing.

I don’t know if they’ve, you know, some states have started to, but my understanding is implementation of FFPSA for these states is it’s, it’s been a slow sort of implementation.  They, you think they’d be one attracted to that? But to answer your original question, I, you know, I haven’t, I haven’t heard of any.

 

TH: Yeah.  Well, we’ll hope that a listener who is connected to one of those states might just take that as something they’d like to take on. So do you see any other policy implications of this research or if you had the ear of policymakers, what would you like them to do based on this research?

 

DJ: We wanna make sure that standards around sibling visitation are applying here to these kids, particularly those kids maybe left at home or re-placed.

I don’t know if we have any regulatory processes to make sure that that’s happening, you know? Sosibling visitation when not all kids are in foster care. I think I’d probably put that, that would be one of the next things on my list to make sure, in terms of the wellbeing of these kids, we’re at least, you know, meeting that sort of necessary criteria.

 

TH: So where’s your research taking you next?

 

DJ: So it’s one limitation is that in national data we’re not good at tracking sibling groups. We’re good at tracking individual kids. We have a kid ID and we can look at them over years,  but there’s no family ID and really any of the data we got. So you might ask, well, how did you do your study?

Well, we had to depend on report IS. So kids in a report.  So I think the next step is getting data, and we actually do have this in Pennsylvania, and my boss was just talking about to me the other day that we should start doing this is being able to identify Bio Model ID.  And so seeing first, if, how well is that indicative or measure that, that they’re in fact a sibling group probably leaving kids out, for instance, maybe a kid was just staying there in the house for the prior month and  maybe isn’t really sibling in some respects.

So we wanna get better at measuring probably sibling-ness.  And so being able to identify a bio mom is probably the next thing that that next place will be headed.  So it comes down to sees own measurement as it always does.

 

TH: Well, Dylan, thank you so much for coming and talking about a really important topic.

We don’t get to, unfortunately, cover research on sibling groups very often, so I was delighted to see this and look forward to seeing more future research from you on this topic. So thank you.

 

DJ: Absolutely. My pleasure.

 

TH: Thanks for listening to One in Ten. You can now also view each episode on our YouTube channel, ‘NCAforCACs’ and for more information about this episode, or any of our other ones, please visit our podcast website at OneinTenpodcast.org.