Out-of-Home Care for Adolescents

Abstract

For the families who are not able to utilize the preventive and supportive services presented in the previous chapter to avert placement of the adolescent or to whom such services have not been made available, placement in out-of-home care is another option. Other adolescents have been long-time users of such care facilities. This chapter opens with a review of how many adolescents are in what types of out-of-home care, and it lists pathways to placement in adolescence. Next follows a discussion of three types of facilities: foster family care, community group homes, and residential/institutional care, with emphasis on the first type of care. For almost all of the adolescents in these facilities, efforts are made to maintain contact with the natural family, and a separate section is devoted to the important topic of parental involvement and its consequences. Adolescents who have long been part of the adoption scene and those who enter it during the teen years after severance of the legal parent-child relationship are discussed in the last section of the chapter. The characteristics, philosophies, and policies of these service systems are fully described in many other sources, referred to in this book; the literature has been used selectively as it sheds light on the experiences of adolescents and their families.