This paper explores the diversity of U.S. state policies and practices for teens in foster care in two potentially competing areas: teens’ need for a permanent connection to a family (either their birth family, or an adoptive or guardian family), and teens’ developmental and practical needs in transitioning to legal adulthood, independence, and self-sufficiency. In the context of these concurrent goals, policies, practices, and programs can serve as incentives or disincentives to pursuing permanency for teens.
Child welfare agencies can use a variety of strategies to achieve permanency for teens and to assist in meeting teens’ developmental needs. In this report, we consider policies and practices that help achieve both goals. These recommendations are framed as minimum standards, but ideally states would go far beyond. Specifically, the authors of this report recommend that states should:
1. Require a robust and ongoing search for relatives and other meaningful adults who will care for the teen. In the first month in care, states should require daily searches for relatives. Searches must be weekly for the next five months, and monthly thereafter. These initial and ongoing efforts should be made with the teen’s input and participation. Strategies to locate and identify fit and willing relatives and other meaningful adults must include interviews with the teen and parent(s), notices to known relatives, and database and records searches.
2. Require parental visitation at least once a week, with emphasis on the importance of daily visitation and contact for all teens for whom reunification is a primary permanency goal. States should require parental visitation within two to three days of removal from the home for all teens to reduce the traumatic impact.
3. Require monthly permanency planning and family finding services that include the teen and the teen’s chosen representatives’ input and participation.
4. Remove financial and service barriers to permanency for teens.
a. States should provide equitable financial payments for relatives and meaningful non-relative adults who care for a teen entering foster care, or entering into adoption or guardianship.
b. States should provide financial payments to all caregivers that support the cost of raising a teenager both in foster care and when they move to permanency.
c. States should provide automatic, continued eligibility for all benefits the teen would be eligible for if they remained in foster care until age 21, such as education, career, health, and independent living supports and services, when they reunify with their family or otherwise attain permanency.
d. States should ensure that a teen and parent(s) continue to receive financial and service supports after reunification to ensure successful transition to adulthood and to prevent reentry into foster care.
5. Require ongoing, active, and documented searches for teens who are missing from care, using dedicated personnel. The missing teen’s placement should be held open for at least one month. The child welfare case should remain open. For teens who return to care there should be an updated case plan to address the reasons the teen was missing from care.
