PRI Family Demography Working Group

PRI Family Demography Working Group

Wednesday, March 2, 12 noon - 1pm EST

"Parental Substance Use and the Paradox of Family Foster Care"

Kristina Brant, Assistant Professor of Rural Sociology

Amid the opioid crisis, the number of kinship families has risen dramatically, as the child welfare system has increasingly turned toward placing children with relative caregivers. While research has shown that children in relative foster care have better health and well-being outcomes than children in non-relative care, relatively little is known about how family units navigate the process of entering and living in foster care arrangements. In this paper, I draw on a sample of 109 ethnographic interviews with relative caregivers, parents whose children are being raised by relatives, and street-level bureaucrats who work in or adjacent to the foster care system—like child welfare caseworkers and family court judges. I find that, while the foster care system draws on natural family support networks to protect the child in question, in doing so, foster care policies and practices can fracture these natural support networks, ultimately removing relatives’ abilities to support the child’s parent as well.  Consequently, relatives are placed in a bind where they must choose to support the child at the expense of supporting the parent—potentially isolating parents navigating substance use disorder and making recovery even more difficult to achieve.