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Has the Child Welfare Profession Discovered Nepotistic Biases?

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Abstract

A major trend in foster care in developed countries over the past quarter century has been a shift toward placing children with “kin” rather than with unrelated foster parents. This change in practice is widely backed by legislation and is routinely justified as being in the best interests of the child. It is tempting to interpret this change as indicating that the child welfare profession has belatedly discovered that human social sentiments are nepotistic in their design, such that kin tend to be the most nurturant alloparents. Arguably, however, the change in practice has been driven by demographic, economic, and political forces rather than by discovery of its benefits. More and better research is needed before we can be sure that children have actually benefitted.

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Notes

  1. A typical contemporary claim is that the primary objective of foster family service is child protection, but more than a decade after the physical abuse of children became widely known and discussed, the Child Welfare League of America (1975) still declared the primary objective of foster family service to be “the promotion of healthy personality development of the child.”

  2. Parent–child concordance in abusive parenting is apparently genuine, but the link is much weaker than is widely believed. A typical finding is that of Bailey et al. (2009), who report that harsh parental discipline in generation 1 accounts for just 4% of the variance in harsh parental discipline in generation 2. Even this modest intergenerational concordance probably exaggerates the extent to which abuse begets abuse, since it also reflects concordance resulting from heritable temperamental factors.

  3. Of course, grandmothers and other relatives have always stepped in to assume childcare duties when parents couldn’t or wouldn’t. Hrdy (1999:372) sums up the cross-cultural ethnographic evidence on informal kin care as follows: “As has always been true, availability of matrilineal kin—sisters, mothers, and grandmothers—makes for an especially reliable source of allomaternal assistance. Not quite a beehive, but far more valuable than a village, an extended family of matrilineal kin turns out to be a wonderful resource for rearing human infants.” But of course this traditional cooperative kin care was negotiated without the involvement of official agencies.

  4. Although kinship care’s greater placement stability, relative to non-kin foster care, has been treated as evidence of the former’s beneficial effects, the relative stability of kin placements may often just reflect a lesser urgency for reunification with birth parents; moreover, non-kin care is sometimes temporary by intent.

  5. http://www.provincialadvocate.on.ca/documents/en/OPACY_AR0809_ENG.pdf, accessed July 19, 2011.

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Acknowledgments

This paper has benefitted from critical comments provided by Adam Sparks and four anonymous referees.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behavior, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, L8S 4K1

    Martin Daly

  2. Children’s Aid Society of the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, N2C 2L9

    Gretchen Perry

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Daly, M., Perry, G. Has the Child Welfare Profession Discovered Nepotistic Biases?. Hum Nat 22, 350–369 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-011-9116-6

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