Out-of-home placement is sometimes necessary to meet the developmental needs of infants and young children through safe, stable and nurturing primary caregiving relationships. Foster parents may include caring and committed adults who have been trained to take on the fostering role with or without the possibility of adoption. Some of these parents might also be kinship caregivers (related family members), or fictive kin (individuals who may be close to the family such as friends).
Federal laws recognize that time is of the essence for infants and young children and, as a result, have set forth established timelines for the child protection process, and mandated referral for screening, evaluation and treatment services. An emphasis is placed on strong community collaboration, especially between child welfare and court systems. Many states have taken this a step farther, by implementing an expedited child protection process and forming court teams made up of child welfare workers, service providers, parents, foster parents, lawyers and judges.
To meet these important timelines, the strategy of concurrent planning may be implemented which includes plans for reunification. This means that foster parents must be “at-the-ready,” working with the court team for the child to return home, or if reunification is not possible, become a life-long permanent family. This poses a dilemma for foster parents as they try to balance their physical and emotional responsivity to the child, the child’s family and all other members of the court team.
[For more on this story by Noelle Hause, go to https://chronicleofsocialchang...needs-foster-parents]
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