Barriers to the involvement of extended family and fictive kin in the lives of children in foster care

ABSTRACTLittle is known about the people who comprise the natural support networks of children in foster care and any barriers to their ability to provide social support. Based on interviews with the network members of 150 children entering foster care, four barriers (criminal history, child welfare history, domestic violence, and substance abuse) were submitted to a latent profile analysis. Two barrier profiles were identified: a lower-barrier profile (87%) and a higher-barrier profile (13%). These results suggest that barriers are common but not widespread across the networks of most children, with implications for what caseworkers can expect when working with families.KEYWORDS: foster carechild welfare systemkinship networkfictive kinsocial supportbarriers Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Additional informationNotes on contributorsScott C. LeonScott Leon is an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at Loyola University Chicago, where he teaches and mentors in the undergraduate and graduate psychology programs. Dr. Leon earned his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Northwestern University Medical School in June, 2002. During his graduate studies, he developed research interests in mental health services evaluation. Dr. Leon’s published work has primarily focused on the mental health and placement outcomes of youth in the child welfare system.Nicole HodgkinsonNicole Hodgkinson graduated with his masters degree in Clinical Psychology with a Child Concentration from Loyola University Chicago in 2021. While in graduate school, she took a strengths-based lens to examine well-being of youth in the child welfare system and among LGBTQ people. Nicole worked with Dr. Scott Leon as part of the Promoting Adjustment in Children through Evaluation (PACE) lab and with Dr. Byron Brooks as part of the Resistance, Intersectionality, Stigma, and Engagement (RISE) Lab. Nicole’s clinical interests include supporting youth who have experienced traumatic events including loss and school-based interventions.Jennifer OsborneJenny Osborne is a 6th year graduate student in the doctoral program in clinical child psychology with a subspeciality in child-clinical subspeciality at Loyola University Chicago. She is currently completing a pre-doctoral internship at the Children’s Hospital of Michigan with an emphasis in pediatric neuropsychology. She also sees youth navigating new medical diagnoses and chronic pain as an outpatient mental health therapist and as a consultation liaison. At Loyola, she conducts research in collaboration with the Promoting Adjustment in Children through Evaluation (PACE) under the mentorship of Dr. Scott Leon. Her body of research includes identifying and bolstering sources of support for children in contact with the child welfare system, as well as examining multi-informant reporting among youth in care.Nathan M. LutzNathan Lutz is a T32 General Pediatrics Research Fellow at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. He received his PhD in clinical psychology with a child-clinical subspecialty from Loyola University Chicago in 2023. During his time at Loyola, he conducted research that aimed to understand the impact of kin involvement for child-welfare-involved youth under the mentorship of Scott Leon in the Promoting Adjustment in Children through Evaluation (PACE) Lab. His current research focuses on understanding how having positive relationships with caring adults can be protective for children, especially those in the child welfare system. Additionally, he is certified as a within-agency trainer for parent-child interaction therapy (PCIT) and is interested in continuing to develop, utilize, and improve evidence-based interventions, such as PCIT and trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT), throughout his career. While at Loyola, he also earned his MS in applied statistics, and he continues to work to understand how to utilize advanced statistical methods in research and direct clinical applications.Lauren A. HindtLauren Hindt received her PhD in clinical psychology with a child-clinical subspecialty from Loyola University Chicago in 2021. Her research interests focus on supporting children in the context of child welfare and parental incarceration. She currently works primarily in clinical practice as a child neuropsychologist.