Kinship Diversion from Foster Care: An Analysis of Prevalence and Causal Impacts on Crime

• In Event: When Policy Meets Practice: Policies that Influence the Child Welfare Trajectory

Abstract

Over 300,000 U.S. children enter foster care each year, though the foster care population has declined substantially over the past two decades as child welfare agencies have increasingly pursued alternatives to formal removal. One such alternative is kinship diversion, sometimes called “shadow foster care,” in which Child Protective Services (CPS) investigators encourage parents to place children informally with relatives without transferring legal custody to the state. Proponents argue that diversion allows children to avoid the disruption of formal foster care and remain with family. Critics, however, contend that diversion may deprive parents of due process and reunification services, provide less support to caregivers, and reduce oversight of child safety. Despite growing policy interest in kinship diversion, little is known about how often it occurs, which families experience it, or what its consequences are.This study examines kinship diversion using linked administrative records from Wisconsin. Our sample includes roughly 700,000 CPS investigations from 2005 to 2023. We link children across child welfare, public benefits, and child support systems to identify parents, relatives, and household members, and use these linkages to construct a novel monthly household roster. This roster allows us to detect post-investigation changes in children’s living arrangements and distinguish informal kin placements from formal foster care. We first document the prevalence of diversion, its evolution over time, and variation across geographic areas and child and case characteristics. Preliminary evidence suggests that diversion is common, occurring in roughly 3 to 5 percent of investigations, or about half as often as formal foster care placement.We then estimate the effects of diversion on later child and parent criminal justice system involvement. Crime is a particularly important outcome in this setting because a large literature documents strong associations between foster care placement and later criminal justice contact, while recent causal evidence suggests that formal foster care may reduce subsequent offending for both children and parents. Diversion may operate differently because it does not trigger the same court oversight, service provision, or reunification requirements as formal foster care. Leveraging rotational caseworker assignment, we implement an examiner assignment design to estimate the effects of diversion on youth justice referrals, criminal case filings, and related proxy outcomes. Taken together, the results will provide new evidence on the role of kinship diversion in the child welfare system and on whether it functions as a beneficial or harmful alternative to family preservation and formal foster care.

Author

• Ezra G. Goldstein, Georgia Institute of Technology
  Presenting Author