Caregiver and Household Instability among Child Welfare-Involved Youth

• In Event: 3581 - Section on Sociology of Children and Youth Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 04. Children, Youth, and Institutions

Abstract

The family is a primary unit of social organization in the United States and a foundation for critical economic, physical, socioemotional, and cultural resources that can affect one’s wellbeing over the life course. Stability within that unit has been found to be largely beneficial in childhood and over the life course. However, in cases of child abuse and neglect, family disruption is considered a societal imperative. In addition to preventing children’s risk of future maltreatment, the foster care placement has the potential to support and enable a child’s integration into a safe but also stable family and household environment. Unfortunately, foster youth appear to be faring extremely poorly in childhood and later in life, but it is unclear whether these outcomes are a function of foster care placement itself or partly due to the health-related, social, and economic disadvantages that put children at risk of maltreatment and foster care placement as well as family and household instability. In this study, I use descriptive methods to leverage detailed information from a nationally-representative survey of children who enter the child welfare system to examine the relationship between children’s foster care placement history and their likelihood of experiencing family and household instability, measured here as changes in caregiver and household composition.

Author

• Youngmin Yi, Cornell University