Kinship Care and Nonrelative Family Foster Care: A Comparison of Caregiver Attributes and Attitudes.

Kinship care--the placement of children with relatives--has increasingly become a preferred placement for children entering out-of-home care in the child protective service system. Although placement with kin has been a historical reality in the informal placement of children, many public agencies are giving priority to relatives when children must be formally placed in out-of-home care Hegar 1993 . For example, in April, 1992, Florida had 11,324 children formally placed in kinship care, a population almost equal to the 11,343 children in family foster care placements at the end of the 1992 fiscal year Florida House of Representatives 1992 . A study of foster and kinship care systems in New York found that almost half of the approximately 50,000 foster children in New York City were placed with relatives Task Force on Permanency Planning 1990 . Although kinship care is often considered a more desirable placement than placement in nonrelative public agency family foster homes, little research has been carried out on the characteristics of kinship care, or on its relative strengths and weaknesses. With many children in need of out-of-home placement, the increased use of kinship care, and the state's responsibility to ensure adequate care when removing and placing children, it is important that public policy concerning the placement of children be guided by knowledge of the kinship and foster care systems Dubowitz et al. 1993 . Kinship Care The literature on kinship care is sparse, but a few published studies do provide a profile of the kinship care systems in the United States. In an exploratory and descriptive study of 20 kinship foster homes in New York City, Thornton 1987, 1991 found that most kinship foster parents were African American (90%) and Protestant (70%). The majority (66%) had less than a high school education and 45% had annual incomes of less than $5,000. The age of the kinship caregivers was 54. Thornton's findings reflected a need for ongoing agency support to this group. Ninety percent of the kinship foster parents interviewed indicated satisfaction with being associated with the agency, and felt that caring for the children placed in their homes would have been more difficult without the support of the agency's social work staff. In a study of children in kinship care in Baltimore, Maryland, Dubowitz et al. 1993 found that the overwhelming majority of children in such care were African American (90%), and that most were placed with a grandmother (47%) or an aunt (29%). The median age of the caregivers was 48 years and only 38% were married or living with someone. The households had a median of three children. Slightly more than half (57%) of the caregivers had not completed high school, and 43% had either full- or part-time employment. The children in their care were described as good-natured (45%) and average or OK (46%), with only 9% described as difficult. Lewis and Fraser 1987 compared nonrelative family foster homes and homes of children's relatives and friends recruited specifically for those children; they found no support for the idea that the recruited homes had a reduced quality of care, and found no significant differences between the two groups on 50 of 59 measures. Of the 30 recruited homes sampled in the study, 11 involved placements with relatives of the child, the majority with aunts/uncles. Lewis and Fraser found that the recruited foster parents had significantly fewer contacts with their caseworkers than did the nonrelative foster parents, and that the nonrelative foster parents were more likely to use time out and point systems, and less likely to talk out problems with their children than the recruited foster parents. Downs 1986 , in an analysis of data from a survey of a sample of licensed foster parents in eight states, examined their demographic characteristics and the incidence of extended family care for children of relatives or acquaintances. …