A few years ago, I joined a Teams call with a large group of scholars to discuss what kinds of research on foster care the state should fund. Experts shared lots of important ideas, especially focused on what researchers could accomplish by linking big datasets on foster care with data on education, health, and contact with the criminal legal system.
But no one was talking about what I thought (as a licensed foster parent in Orange County) was the elephant in the room: between 2020 and 2022, North Carolina had lost about one in four of its licensed foster homes. Before the pandemic, many counties needed more foster homes; by 2022, many counties were in a state of crisis. If the state was going to fund research on foster care, I thought, shouldn’t we be focusing at least in part on the post-pandemic foster home shortage?
When my wife and I began fostering in 2017, it seemed like our county’s foster families were doing an okay job keeping up with the need for placements. My MAPP class was large and lively. When I got my first placement call, the social worker left a voicemail encouraging me to call back fast, because she was reaching out to several families, and the child was likely to be placed quickly.
During the pandemic, however, my county lost dozens of licensed homes. In the years that followed, instead of easygoing voicemails, we often got urgent-sounding mass emails. Our social workers were doing everything they could to find good placements in our county—while juggling the work of recruiting, training, and licensing new foster parents—but in the wake of COVID, the need for placements was outpacing the number of available homes.
Unfortunately, the statewide foster home shortage was easy for researchers and lawmakers to miss. If you weren’t on the front lines in the years after the pandemic began—working in or with county DSS agencies—you could be forgiven for not immediately recognizing the crisis of foster parent recruitment, retention, and utilization. I just so happened to be both a foster parent and a university-based researcher (I’m a political scientist at Duke), but not everyone in research and policymaking has a front-row seat for the changing realities of post-pandemic foster care—and that can lead those of us on the research side to sometimes miss the things that matter most.
On some level, we all understand that. If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re probably familiar with Shared Parenting, the framework that sees everyone in a child’s life—parents, families, social workers, GALs, resource parents, teachers, doctors, and others—as part of a cooperative community, each brining unique resources and perspectives to a collective effort to ensure the best possible outcomes for the children. In this view, it’s only when everyone has a seat at the table that we’re able to see the big picture and do our best for kids in care.
The same can be said about research on the child welfare system. No matter how much researchers care, no matter how hard they work, they won’t do as much good if they work in a silo, cut off from the day-to-day realities of agency staff and leadership, GALs, lawmakers, resource parents, families, and children in care. We do our best work in conversation with everyone involved in child welfare.
Thankfully, North Carolina has programs designed to do exactly that. NCDHHS and the Foster Family Alliance of North Carolina partner each year to send out surveys of children in care and foster and resource parents (watch your email each spring for the Resource Parent Needs Assessment). The NC Collaboratory (a program created by the General Assembly that funds partnerships between government agencies and outside researchers) recently sponsored a series of studies that each involve a university-based research team partnering with the director of a county DSS agency to carry out research that could benefit the foster care system in that county. The Collaboratory described it as “a first-of-its-kind effort to embed local agencies as co-designers of research projects that directly impact practice and policy.” It’s inspiring to see the people who teach Shared Parenting practicing Shared Research, too, bringing together every possible stakeholder and resource to try to achieve the best outcomes they can.
My modest attempt at Shared Research is an ongoing study funded by the NC Collaboratory (with my co-PI Carolyn Barnes at the University of Chicago School of Social Work and Research Assistant Jackson Streit) that tries to understand why North Carolina lost so many foster homes during the pandemic, what county agencies are doing to recruit and train new foster homes, what challenges they face, and what kinds of supports they need from county and state governments. In the spirit of Shared Research, the project consists of hour-long interviews with licensing social workers and other county DSS staff who recruit and retain foster parents, and the questions we ask were developed in collaboration with leaders in NC DHHS and partners in the General Assembly.
What we’re hearing puts the post-pandemic foster home crisis in sharp relief. Many county agencies are still facing critical shortages of licensed foster homes. Without enough homes, social workers spend more time and energy searching for placements, which leaves less time for training and licensing, which in turn means that the shortage of foster homes lasts longer. This vicious cycle too often leaves children and agency staff sleeping in DSS offices or hotel rooms, or traveling out of county for faraway placements—which in turn amplify the trauma that children experience and the secondary trauma and burnout our agency staff endure. To make matters worse, “behaviors” among children seem to be on the rise post-pandemic, and foster parents seem to be more selective and less resilient (“picky” or “wimpy” might be less diplomatic ways to put it). North Carolina doesn’t just have a post-pandemic recruitment and retention challenge, it has a foster home utilization problem, too.
Of course, our conversations with social workers have naturally surfaced lots of great solutions. Counties can provide more funding for agency staff positions, agencies can participate in communities of practice to share ideas, the state can better compensate fictive kinship care (by people close to child who are not blood relatives), and DHHS can create a “common app” that would allow county agencies to more quickly find placements in private foster agencies when needed. We have options here!
But researchers and policymakers won’t understand how vitally important those proposals are unless they hear directly from the people who know. We need Shared Parenting for our kids, and Shared Research for our foster care system.
Dr. Nicholas Carnes is a licensed foster and adoptive parent, foster care researcher, and Professor of Political Science at Sociology at Duke University
