Foster Care: Kinship Care Quality and Permanency Issues

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed how well kinship care is serving foster children, focusing on the: (1) quality of care that children in kinship care receive compared with that received by other foster children, as measured by a caseworker's assessment of a caregiver's parenting skills, the extent to which a foster child is able to maintain contact with familiar people and surroundings, and a caregiver's willingness to enforce court-ordered restrictions on parental visits; (2) frequency with which state child welfare agencies pursue various permanent living arrangements and the time children in kinship care have spent in the system compared with other foster children; and (3) recent state initiatives intended to help ensure that children in kinship care receive good quality foster care and are placed in permanent homes in a timely manner.