Understanding the Decline In Foster Care Entries In the United States

In 2016, the number of children entering foster care in the United States began to steadily decline. The decline has been dramatic, from 273,000 children in 2016 to 170,000 in 2024, a 37.7% decrease. Foster care entry has profound consequences for the lives of children, and this shift is among the most consequential in the U.S. social services systems in the past 10 years.

This drop may be a positive development. Foster care is a last resort, used only when it is not possible to leave children with their caregivers due to concerns of child maltreatment, caregiver absence, or caregiver incapacity. The administration for Children and Families has endorsed this perspective, describing the decline as a success. Yet, in order to evaluate whether the decline is good or bad, one must understand relationships to the wellbeing of children. At a population level, less foster care may not mean safer children any more than fewer ambulance trips mean less injuries. One concerning related trend is that reported child maltreatment (hotline) rates have not decreased through the same period. Not only have researchers not established if it is a positive development, few have even addressed it.

This roundtable session will provide an open dialogue for researchers to tackle three broad questions 1) is the decline experienced equally among different geographically and sociodemographically defined groups of children? 2) what changes to the social, cultural or policy landscape may be plausibly driving the decline? and, perhaps most importantly, 3) is the decline good for the wellbeing of children?

For the first question, presenters will leverage nationwide foster care data and examine the decline at the state level and explore how the composition of the characteristics of children in foster care, such as age and race/ethnicity, has changed over the time period. For the second question, the presenters will put forth eight explanations for the decline, including changes to government policy, such as the Family First Prevention and Services Act, as well as indicators of wellbeing apart from maltreatment. For each of the potential explanations, the authors present descriptive analyses based off various publicly available data sources to evaluate the plausibility of each explanation. For the third question, the presenters will open up an active dialogue and debate both amongst presenters and audience members to explore not only if the decline is good, but how could the question even be empirically answered. The presenters will guide the dialogue by posing potentially challenging questions including: even if the decline of foster care made children less safe, is it still worth it given the decreased splitting of families?

We believe that this topic is well suited for a roundtable as answering this question cannot be done with just one analysis or research team. It is our hope that the roundtable will bring about a dialogue between researchers with varying methodological skills and theoretical frameworks that will spark future empirical analyses to tackle this important question.