Creating better placements for teens in the child welfare system

The challenge

Child welfare agencies struggle to offer teens long-term placements with foster families that are willing and able to facilitate teen thriving and preparation for adulthood.

Bloom worked with Marina Nitze from The Child Welfare Playbook and Michigan Department of Health and Human Services to understand how to improve placements for teens in care. This work serves as a foundation for ongoing work in understanding unique placement needs within the child welfare space.

The project

We began our project by reviewing wide-ranging research on the needs of teens while in foster care. Then we conducted interviews and observations with agency staff, families, and former foster youth who were in care as teens.

We collected data from the following groups:

• 5 subject-matter experts
• 11 conversations with child welfare staff
• 11 foster families who have taken teen placements
• 18 former foster youth who were teens in care

We anticipated that recruitment would be tricky, and indeed we faced challenges in getting responses and connections to youth and families. We tried a few new strategies for recruitment that yielded a successful sample in the end. This included outreach on Facebook community groups and text reminders with participants to help us track which methods were successful.

We also attended foster parent training sessions run by Michigan DHHS, to understand how they learn about teens’ needs.

In co-design workshops, we worked with former foster youth to collaboratively design our recommendations. We centered youth voices and experiences in our methods and in our final deliverables.

The result

We found that being in care as a teen is a deeply disempowering experience in 3 key ways:

1. Teen basic needs are not always being met and they are not receiving the necessary care to heal and thrive
2. Teens lack autonomy, information, and involvement in critical decisions related to their lives
3. Teens need more scaffolding to experiment, practice, and master skills necessary for adulthood

We synthesized what we learned in our conversations and research and proposed recommendations for child welfare agencies throughout the U.S. who work directly with foster families:

1. Listen to and prioritize teen voices. Learn from Michigan's successes by instituting Youth Advisory Boards (YABs) widely and partnering with universities and community-based organizations as needed.
2. Improve foster parent training and preparation. Evaluate the emphasis in training on parenting children vs. teens and provide practical parenting strategies and examples.
3. Prepare for emotional impacts of transitions. Allow youth to have basic necessities and take things from their home that are comforting to them.
4. Overhaul mental health provider system. Give youth choice and a say in the therapy they are offered. And make sure youth have solo therapy separate from family therapy sessions.
5. Create sustained relationships with supportive adults. Evaluate independent living programs to make sure youth have supportive adults and needed supports.
6. Expand opportunities for teens to master adult skills. Demystify the application process for the different social benefits that youth are eligible for.

Find more of our findings and recommendations here: Creating better placements for teens: Findings and recommendations (PDF version)

Teens in foster care have specific needs around emotional and psychological support and autonomy and responsibility. Our findings and recommendations for recruiting and supporting these families builds on what we learned in our research about what makes successful foster families.

This work is part of a broader portfolio of work in the child welfare space. Find more of our work with children and families here.