Should the State Parent Young Adults? Evidence from the Midwest Studyⁱ
By Mark E. Courtney

When children are removed from their homes due to parental abuse or neglect and placed into out-of-home care, the state public child welfare agency, under the supervision of the juvenile court, takes on the role of parent. While a child is in out-of-home care, the public agency is responsible for ensuring their day-to-day care and supervision. This state responsibility continues until the child is returned home, placed with another family through adoption or guardianship, runs away from care and cannot be found, or moves to another care system through institutionalization (i.e., is incarcerated or placed in a psychiatric facility). If youth in out-of-home care do not exit care via any of these routes, they eventually reach the age at which the public agency is allowed under state law to “emancipate” them to independent living, regardless of the wishes of the youth. From the perspective of the state agency, discharging a youth to emancipated status means that the state ceases to bear any legal parental responsibility towards the youth’s care and supervision. Thus, while a public child welfare agency may voluntarily decide to provide a variety of services to youth after discharge from care, the agency is not obligated to do so and the juvenile court cannot compel the agency to do so.

Put simply, when youth “age out” of the foster care system in the U.S., the state ceases to be their parent. In all but a few jurisdictions, states relinquish their parental responsibilities when youth reach the age of majority; the federal government currently only reimburses states for the costs of foster care through age 18 under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act.

In recent years, child welfare practitioners and policymakers have begun to question the wisdom of federal policy that ends reimbursement to states for foster care at age 18. Reflecting continuing interest by policymakers in improving prospects for foster youth in transition, the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act (Public Law 110-351) was signed into law by President Bush in October 2008. The new law amends Title IV-E by giving states an option to extend foster care to age 21 with continuing federal financial support.

Whether states will exercise this option may depend in part on whether policymakers believe that remaining in care past 18 is of benefit to foster youth.

The Midwest Study

The Midwest Evaluation of the Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth (“Midwest Study”) provides evidence of the potential benefits to foster youth of extending the provision of foster care past age 18. The Midwest Study is a collaborative effort among the public child welfare agencies in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin Survey Center (UWSC), and Partners for Our Children (POC) at the University of Washington, Seattle.

The Midwest Study is following the progress of foster youth in the three states who entered care prior to their 16th birthday, had been in out-of-home care for at least one year at the time of baseline interviews, and whose primary reason for placement was abuse and/or neglect. Baseline interviews were conducted with 732 youth in the three states between May 2002 and March 2003 when all of the youth were 17 or 18 years old. Eighty-two percent (n = 603) of these 732 youth were re-interviewed between March and December 2004, when nearly all were 19 years old. A third wave of survey data was collected between March 2006 and January 2007 (n = 591) when nearly all of the young people were 21 years old. The Midwest Study describes the experiences of foster youth in transition to adulthood between ages 17 and 21 across a broad range of indicators of well-being.

Policy variation across the states involved in the Midwest Study allows for an examination of the potential effects of supporting states to extend foster care past 18. Foster youth in Iowa and Wisconsin are generally discharged from care around the time of their 18th birthday and almost never after age 18, whereas Illinois’ foster youth are allowed to remain in care until their 21st birthday. While some anecdotal reports suggest that many foster youth would not choose to remain under the care and supervision of the public child welfare agency and juvenile court past 18, our study findings from Illinois suggest the opposite; most of the young people in Illinois remained in care past their 20th birthday with many remaining to age 21. The differing state policies lead to vastly different care experiences; Illinois youth remained in care an average of over 20 months longer than their peers in Iowa and Wisconsin.

What do our study findings suggest regarding the potential benefits of extending foster care past age 18?

Higher Education

Our data suggest that foster youth often carry pre-existing educational fee deficits into their early adult years. Nearly one-quarter of the young adults in the Midwest Study had not obtained a high school diploma or a GED by age 21. In fact, these young adults were more than twice as likely not to have a high school diploma or GED as their peers. Conversely, only 30 percent of the young adults in the Midwest Study had completed any college compared with 53 percent of 21 year olds nationally.

To provide a test of the effect of allowing youth to remain in care past age 18 on college enrollment and attainment, we compared between states the percentage of youth at 21 who had (1) ever been enrolled in college and (2) had completed at least one year of college. Youth in Illinois are 1.9 times more likely (58 percent versus 30 percent) to have completed at least some college and 2.2 times more likely (38 percent versus 17percent) to have completed one year of college than their peers in Iowa and Wisconsin. We also conducted multivariate statistical models of both of these higher education outcomes, controlling for the characteristics of the youth in the study as assessed during our baseline interviews at age 17-18. These analyses also show strong between-state effects on the likelihood of college participation by the foster youth in the Midwest Study. Even after controlling for observed differences in the characteristics of the youth in our study, the estimated odds of foster youth in Illinois attending college by age 21 were about four times greater than those of foster youth in Iowa and Wisconsin; the estimated odds of foster youth in Illinois having completed at least one year of college by age 21 were approximately 3.5 times higher than those of foster youth in the other two states.

Earnings

Data from the Midwest Study provide a sobering view of the employment and earnings of foster youth in transition to adulthood. When interviewed at age 21, only about half were currently working, which is lower than the employment rate among 21 year olds nationally. Although more than three-quarters of the young adults in the Midwest Study interviewed at age 21 reported having any income from employment during the past year, their earnings were very low. Median earnings among those who had been employed were just $5,450.

We chose to examine the potential relationship between remaining in care and earnings by estimating the effect of each additional year of care on self-reported earnings during the 12 months prior to our interviews at age 21. First, we estimated a statistical model of earnings in the year prior to the wave three interviews, controlling for the characteristics of the youth in the study as assessed during our baseline interviews at age 17-18, and focusing on the effect of each additional year that a youth remained in care on their later earnings. We found that each additional year of care was associated with a $470 increase in annual earnings. Using an alternative estimator of the relationship between remaining in care and earnings, one that attempts to control for unmeasured differences between youth that are associated both with their likelihood to remain in care and their likelihood of having earnings, we found that each additional year of care was associated with an increase of $924 in annual earnings.

Pregnancy

Despite declining overall pregnancy rates among adolescents, teenage pregnancy and childbearing remain significant problems, particularly among youth in foster care; 71 percent of the young women in the Midwest Study had been pregnant by age 21, and half of those had been pregnant by age 19, rates much higher than for the general population. Considerable costs are associated with teen pregnancy, both to the young women involved and to their children, implying that delayed pregnancy among female foster youth making the transition to adulthood should be considered a worthwhile goal.

In order to assess the relationship between remaining in care and the timing of pregnancies among the young women in our study, we estimated a multivariate statistical model of the timing of pregnancies between our first wave of interviews at age 17-18 and our last interviews at age 21. These statistical models allowed us to assess the association, if any, between being in state-supervised out-of-home care and becoming pregnant, while controlling for the baseline characteristics of the young women in our study. Our analyses suggest that being in care is associated with a 38 percent reduction in the rate at which the young women in our study become pregnant between ages 17-18 and 19.

Implications

Our findings provide support for state-level efforts to implement the recent amendments of Title IV-E of the Social Security Act that provide federal funding for states that choose to allow young people to remain in state care past age 18. In Illinois, where remaining in care until age 21 is already an option, foster youth are more likely to pursue higher education. This policy also seems to be associated with higher earnings and delayed pregnancy. As states decide to opt in to these new provisions of federal law, it will be important to evaluate the effects of variations in how states extend foster care to young adults in order to improve policy and practice directed towards this group of young adults.

About Author:

Mark E. Courtney is the Executive Director of Partners for Our Children and the Ballmer Endowed Chair for Child Well-Being, School of Social Work University of Washington.

¹This paper is based on the following report: Courtney, M. E., Dworsky, A., and Pollack, H. (2007). When Should the State Cease Parenting? Evidence from the Midwest Study. Chicago: Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago. The report is available at: http://www.chapinhall.org/article_abstract.aspx?ar=1355.

Previous article: Emergent Literacy in Pre-School Children: Finding from the Ontario Looking After Children (OnLAC) Project

Next article: OACAS Celebrates National Social Worker Week