Child protective services (CPS) systems in the United States are charged with promoting child safety, permanency (stable, long-term living arrangements), and wellbeing by responding to allegations of abuse and neglect and intervening to protect maltreated children. CPS involvement and, to a lesser extent, resulting foster care placement are relatively common experiences for American children, particularly low-income children and children of color. A large literature indicates that, on average, children who experience CPS-involvement and, especially, foster care placement experience adverse educational, social and economic outcomes throughout the life course. Moreover, nearly half of all youth who experience foster care as adolescents emancipate from (age out of) care by reaching the age of majority without having been reunified with their family of origin, adopted, or exited to another permanent living arrangement.
This seminar highlights several recent collaborative studies leveraging extensive linked multi-system longitudinal administrative data spanning the full population of children and families who have been involved in social welfare programs in the State of Wisconsin to construct multiple counterfactual conditions against which to assess the likelihood that foster care placement or aging out of care, themselves, are likely causally related to poor educational achievement and attainment, teen pregnancy, low employment and earnings, and incarceration.
Presented by: Lawrence (Lonnie) M. Berger, Associate Vice Chancellor for Research in the Social Sciences; Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Social Work, University of Wisconsin-Madison
