The evidence is in: Study after study after study finds that in typical cases children left in their own homes fare better than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care

UPDATED, OCTOBER 2025

There are a couple of studies that I cite so often on this blog and elsewhere that I once suggested readers could run a betting pool to guess which paragraph would contain the reference.

They are the three massive studies of more than 15,000 typical cases conducted by MIT researcher Prof. Joseph Doyle.  The longitudinal studies compared children in typical child welfare cases who were placed in foster care to children experiencing the same sort of alleged abuse or neglect who were left in their own homes. 

The studies didn’t guess what happened to these children based on subjective assessments. And the studies didn’t track the children for just a few months or maybe a year or two.  These studies tracked the children all the way into late adolescence and young adulthood and looked at what actually happened to them.  Typically, on measure after measure, the children left in their own homes did better.  A second, even larger study, confirmed the findings.

  

That was a decade ago.  In all the time since, the study has remained definitive. Nothing has matched it for size, scope or rigor. The closest that foster-care apologists could come to finding a flaw is their claim that the studies didn’t follow young children.  (In fact, they followed children as young as age 5.)

So the only straw at which the foster-care apologists could grasp was the hope – with no evidence – that the results would be different for even younger children.

But that ignored still another study, (also discussed here) from University of Minnesota researchers.  Using different methodology and outcomes, but again tracking actual outcomes all the way into adolescence, this study looked at children who first entered foster care anywhere from birth to age 9.  This study also was an apples-to-apples comparison. The researchers  looked at children under comparable circumstances and it, too, found that the children left in their own homes did better.

OK, the foster care apologists might say, but what about just infants. If we limit the study to just infants will we get the results we want?  No. Not even when the infants are born with cocaine in their systems.

University of Florida researchers studied two groups of such children; one group was placed in foster care, another left with birth mothers able to care for them.  After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development: rolling over, sitting up, reaching out.  Typically, the children left with their birth mothers did better.  For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine.

None of these studies is perfect, of course. But compare the rigor of these studies to the best the foster-care apologists can come up with.

The 2018 study

And now comes study #6.  Unlike the others, this one concerns children in Finland.  Once again it directly examined comparable cases. Once again it tracked the children all the way to young adulthood.  And, like the Minnesota study, this one was limited to young children – ages 2 to 6.  Once again, the children left in their own homes did better.

The researchers note one point about their child welfare system that they seem to think might make it different from the one in the United States. They write:

…in the Finnish context, the main reason for placement is not abuse but some level of neglect or inability to care for the child as a result of parental poor mental health, financial difficulties or the accumulation of problems.

But in fact, those are the main reasons for placement in the United States as well.  And,  as this investigative report from Finland’s public broadcaster YLE makes clear, the Finnish system’s denial of due process and penchant for needless removal are depressingly similar to the American system.

The fact that researchers got these results in Finland is important for a very different reason: In America foster-care apologists constantly blame the rotten outcomes of foster care on the fact that the system is underfunded.  If only we had more money, they claim, we could fix it.

But Finland is a world leader in social welfare spending; by some measures it’s #1 in the European Union.  If money is the problem, then the results from Finland should be vastly different.  That they are not is still more evidence that foster care is inherently so traumatic for a child that it is fundamentally unfixable. 

The 2019 Studies

This study took a different approach. It compared families who received high-quality interdisciplinary family defense to families that did not.  Children of the families who received this defense spent significantly less time in foster care, with no compromise of safety.

Another study in 2019 compared mental health outcomes for maltreated children placed in foster care compared to those left in their own homes.  The foster children were nearly twice as likely to suffer from Reactive Attachment Disorder - not surprising, since one cause of RAD is "repeated changes of primary caregivers. ..."

The 2024 Studies

This study looked at outcomes for Canadian First Nations children. Published in one of the world’s leading journals, The Lancet, it found that “Being in [our-of-home care] worsened children's health and legal system outcomes … out-of-home care [is] as risky (or more) as leaving a child requiring protection at home…”

There's also this stunning finding from Sweden. Again, comparing a huge sample of comparably-maltreated young people: By age 20, those torn from their homes were more than four times more likely to die – most often by suicide. More than 8% of the foster children died, compared to under two percent of those left in their own homes. Among those who lived, those s who had been placed in foster care were more likely to commit crimes.

A study of the studies

And then there's this, from a review of studies concerning the impact of foster care on criminal behavior:

Many studies (82% of the eleven studies that addressed the first research question) showed higher rates of offending behavior for maltreated youth placed in foster care compared to those who remained at home, while some studies (27%) found no difference between the two groups of maltreated youth. One study showed higher risk of offending for maltreated youth who remained at home compared to maltreated youth placed in foster care only. Another study showed mixed findings ...

None of this means that no child ever should be placed in foster care.  But it all shows that foster care is an extremely toxic intervention that should be used sparingly and in small doses.  And, at long last, the burden of proof should shift from those who want children to remain safely in their own homes to those who want those children taken away.

Special thanks to Alia Innovations, whose own review of the literature led me to some of the studies cited in this update.

Mr. Butts and the foster-care apologists

Saying we don’t know if foster care causes rotten outcomes for foster children is like saying we don’t know if cigarettes cause cancer Photo from Libreshot

There is an old Doonesbury cartoon in which Mr. Butts, the anthropomorphic apologist for the tobacco industry is testifying before Congress.

“Good News, Congressfolk!” says Mr. Butts. “The evidence linking smoking with cancer and heart disease is still inconclusive!  That’s right, the jury is still out! Is that great or what?”

I thought of Mr. Butts as I read a column by Naomi Schaefer Riley in which she tries to persuade us that, when it comes to whether it is harmful to tear a child away from everyone he knows and loves and consign him to foster care – well, the jury is still out.

Riley, you may recall, is a now former blogger for the Chronicle of Higher Education. She was kicked off that blog after writing a vile column smearing the entire field of Black Studies – based solely on her disdain for the titles and summaries of three dissertations in the field.  Years later, in a column for Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, she would go on to explain that racism is so over because

African-Americans have full legal rights. Hate crimes are anomalies. Black people are running corporations, universities and until recently the White House.

So who could possibly be a better judge of whether children in foster care – children who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite – are harmed by being there?

Pipeline, what pipeline?

Riley is upset by the notion of a “foster care to prison pipeline” – that is, the idea that if a child is placed in foster care the harm of that experience makes it more likely that the child will wind up in jail.  She seems even more upset by the notion that racial bias might contribute to the needless removal of children - after all, racism is over, remember?

Riley doesn’t deny that former foster children are overrepresented in our prisons. She does not deny – but also doesn’t mention – a whole slew of other rotten outcomes for a shocking number of children who endure foster care, such as their high rates of unemployment, food insecurity and homelessness, and their extremely low rate of college graduation.

Rather she falls back on the classic excuse of America’s foster care-industrial complex: Hey, it’s not our fault; those kids were all messed up by their no-good parents before we ever got 'em. What do you expect us to do, actually make things better?

So Riley claims that “We can’t separate the effect of kids being in abusive and/or neglectful homes and the effect of the foster care system.”

There are two problems with this claim. First, not all children placed in foster care came from “abusive and/or neglectful homes.” Many came from homes that were simply poor.

And second, the claim that we can’t separate the effect of the children’s circumstances before foster care to the effect of foster care itself is simply not true.

We can. And we have.

Findings from the definitive studies

MIT Prof. Joseph Doyle did a direct head-to-head comparison of outcomes in typical child welfare cases. He looked at records of more than 15,000 children, followed them all the way into their late teen years and, in some cases, young adulthood.  He compared children placed in foster care to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. He focused on the typical cases, not the extremes. Most important, he didn’t simply make a subjective assessment of the youths, or rely on the subjective assessments of others.  Rather, he looked at what actually happened to them.

Compared to the comparably maltreated children left in their own homes, the foster children were:

● Less likely to hold a job for at least three years.

● More likely to become pregnant as teenagers.

● More likely to be involved in the juvenile justice system.

● More likely to be arrested as young adults.

And, by the way, these studies are not alone. A third study, from researchers at the University of Minnesota, using different methodology and outcome measures also found that children placed in foster care fared worse than comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes.

So yes, Naomi, there is a foster care to prison pipeline – and a whole lot of other harm, too.

To make her Mr. Butts-style the-jury-is-still-out case, Riley cites one article, by Youngmin Yi and Christopher Wildeman of Cornell University in which the authors claim that

prior research provides little insight into the direct effects of foster care placement on children: the few studies designed to isolate the effect of foster care placement haven’t reached a consensus regarding its impact on children.

A foundation of sand

But Yi and Wildeman build their case on a foundation of sand.  They rely on a single, smaller study by Lawrence Berger and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, using far more subjective criteria than the MIT studies, and suggest this somehow is equal to the MIT studies. (They don’t mention the University of Minnesota study at all.)

The MIT studies followed children well into adolescence and beyond, and looked at what actually happened to the children. The University of Wisconsin study followed children for an average of only two-and-a-half years, measured only two outcomes and, for one of those outcomes – the extent of the children’s behavioral problems - relied on questionnaires filled out by the children’s current caretakers. Obviously that’s a far more subjective method than the method used for the MIT studies – seeing what actually happened to the youth.

Compounding the problem: Berger and his co-authors admit that when these sorts of questionnaires are filled out by different people at different times, it “may be problematic.”  No kidding.  In fact, alleged “differences” in behavior may simply mean differing perceptions by the people filling out the questionnaires.

They fail to acknowledge still another problem: Foster parents were asked to fill out a questionnaire assessing the children’s behavior while in their foster homes.  In effect, they’re being asked how well they are doing as foster parents. No chance of bias there!

Berger & Co. then use several different “analytic models” to compare the two outcomes, including the subjective evaluations of behavior for the foster children and the subjective evaluations of behavior for the children left in their own homes. They argue that the model that produced the results most favorable to foster care is the least biased.

After all that: no improvement

But even this method for calculating results from this one study did not find that foster care made things any better for the children.  The best Berger and Co. could say is that, using some of the models they applied to a partially subjective evaluation of only two outcomes, the foster children didn’t do any worse than the children left in their own homes.

Consider the implications:  Suppose you went to a doctor complaining of an illness.  The doctor said: “I’d like to prescribe this medicine. Massive studies indicate that the medicine has terrible side effects and may well make you sicker.  But there is one study that says it won’t do you any good, but it won’t actually hurt you.”

Would you take the medicine?

Of course, it’s worse for foster children. They have no choice. Similarly, the Mr. Butts approach to research is worse when the topic is foster care than when the topic is tobacco. At least no one is forced to smoke cigarettes.

Trashing kinship care

But Riley doesn’t stop with sliming birth parents. She also slimes the least harmful form of foster care, kinship care - placing children with relatives instead of total strangers.  She quotes a conference speaker from Harvard who claimed that “If you have a parent who has been arrested, you are twice as likely to have an aunt or an uncle who has been arrested.”

To which the proper scientific response is: So what?

For starters, many parents who lose children to foster care have not been arrested. Others have been arrested for the same basic reason their kids were taken: they are poor and nonwhite. And being arrested does not preclude being a good parent – something that is apparently beyond the ability of some academicians to understand.

And here, again, the evidence is in. Multiple studies have found that kinship care typically is better for children’s well-being, more stable, and, most important, safer than what should properly be called stranger care.

In fact, even Youngman Yi and Christopher Wildeman admit this.  In the same article Riley cites when it supports her point of view, Yi and Wildeman also write that:

A wealth of evidence illustrates the benefits of kin-based care relative to other placement types and shows that existing social networks play a critical role in supporting children’s wellbeing.  

For some reason, Riley doesn’t mention that part of the article.

Foster care is fundamentally unfixable

And what does Riley propose as an alternative to curbing the needless removal of children? The usual foster care-industrial complex bromide: Make foster care “better.”

Well yes, we could make foster care better.  But not by much.  Here again that pesky research gets in the way.

One of the many, many studies documenting the horrible outcomes for foster children found that only 20 percent of the children studied were doing well as young adults.  But this same study also attempted something else: It came up with a formula to estimate how much better the outcomes would be if somehow everything wrong with foster care were fixed and the system were perfect. The answer: The outcomes would improve by 22.2 percent.

So if foster care were made perfect, it would churn out walking wounded only three times out of five instead of four.

That’s well worth trying. But the real lesson from that study, and all the others, is that foster care is fundamentally unfixable.

But Riley really reveals her true colors when she explains how to “fix” foster care. Her first recommendation “We could do a better job recruiting more stable middle-class families of all races.” [Emphasis added.]

Right. Because nothing is more important for a child’s well-being than how much money his caretakers have.

None of this means that no child ever should be placed in foster care.

There are times when parents really are horrible and children really need to be saved from those parents. There are times when foster care clearly is the least bad option. Not a good option, but the least detrimental alternative.

Burden of proof

As so often happens when foster-care apologists try to defend the system, they put the burden of proof in the wrong place.   Long ago, when I was just starting out as a reporter, it was actually the head of an adoption agency who said something I've never forgotten: "The burden of proof should always rest with those who believe children don't belong in their families."

Yet Riley suggests the fact that there exists a study showing that foster care does not make things worse is reason enough to keep right on throwing children into the system – and failing to hold the system accountable for what happens to those children.  When will we finally demand that the foster-care apologists prove that their intervention is actually better for children in typical child welfare cases?

Of course they can’t do that.  Because, contrary to Riley’s claim, when it comes to the way the foster care system harms children in typical cases, the jury is in.  And the verdict is best summed up by another famous line from Doonesbury:

“Guilty, guilty, guilty!”

For once a happy anniversary: The story about the study that (probably) changed child welfare is ten years old

NCCPR’s full analysis of the studies discussed in this post, and links to the studies themselves, are available here

While we were celebrating the anniversary of American independence over the past few days,  we passed another anniversary that deserves attention.  The anniversary of this news story:

In its issue dated July 3-4, 2007, USA Today published a front page story by Wendy Koch headlined "Kids in troubled homes still better off than in foster care, study finds.”

The story reported on the pioneering work of MIT Prof. Joseph J. Doyle; specifically the first of his massive studies comparing the outcomes for children placed in foster care to children left in their own homes.  The study looked at precisely the cases where the child welfare debate is most important – the “in-between” cases, where a decision could go either way.

As USA Today explained the results:

Children whose families are investigated for abuse or neglect are likely to do better in life if they stay with their families than if they go into foster care, according to a pioneering study. …

Kids who stayed with their families were less likely to become juvenile delinquents or teen mothers and more likely to hold jobs as young adults, says the study by Joseph Doyle, an economics professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management who studies social policy.

"The size of the effects surprised me, because all the children come from tough families," Doyle says. The National Science Foundation funded the study.

There was, in fact, a wealth of earlier research suggesting similar results, including a study the year before using different methodology but coming to remarkably similar conclusions. But the Doyle study stood out for its size, its scope, its rigor and its clear findings.

One year later, Prof. Doyle published another study, with an even larger sample.  The results: Once again, children left in their own homes did better.

How did child welfare respond?

The take-the-child-and-run extremists have spent the past ten years pretending the studies don’t exist.  But there are many people of good will in child welfare, and some of them are willing to reconsider old assumptions in the face of new research. 

The year 2007 saw the first significant decline in entries into foster care in decades (there was a very small decline the year before). While I can’t prove that Prof. Doyle’s study contributed to that, I suspect that it played an important role. The decline continued until 2013 – I will discuss why it stopped, and the myths about why it stopped, in a post to this Blog on Monday.

So thank you Prof. Doyle, for helping to spare thousands of children from the traumas you describe in your work. And thank you Wendy Koch - the former USA Today reporter who made that study front page news.

The naked emperors of social work

Yesterday's post to this blog about still another study, from Prof. Joseph Doyle of MIT, showing that children left in their own homes generally fare better than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care, prompted a question to a listserv from a lawyer, which I will paraphrase this way: Why aren't more people paying attention? In other words, with all that solid research pointing to the harm of foster care, why do our laws and policies still encourage a take-the-child-and-run approach?

There are a couple of reasons. For starters, lawmakers are far more likely to base legislation on the latest horror story in the news than on actual research. It's hard to imagine legislators reading Prof. Doyle's study and then rushing off to pass "Joseph's Law" to make it harder to tear apart families.

But also, there is a profound bias in the social work community – a bias favoring child removal. (Prof. Doyle is not a social worker, and his studies have not appeared in social work journals.) Indeed, in child welfare, the more a researcher pompously proclaims his neutrality, the more he insists he is a paragon of objectivity who merely goes "where the research leads," the more he looks down his nose at mere mortals and, to paraphrase an old Chevy Chase routine, says "I'm a scholar – and you're not!" – the more you'd better look very, very closely at the "methodology" section in the actual research. There are some outstanding scholars in the field of social work – but there are others for whom "scholar" is just a euphemism for ideologue-with-a-Ph-D.

I can't prove that empirically, of course. But I can show evidence of a profound bias in social work scholarship, thanks to some wonderful research done more than 20 years ago by, yes, a professor of social work.

His name is William Epstein, and this is what he did: He submitted to various journals a study concerning the efficacy of taking children from their parents when the children had asthma. But the study was a fake. The real research subjects were the editors of scholarly journals. Half of the editors got studies "concluding" that taking away the children helped with their asthma. The other half got studies concluding that taking away the children didn't work.

The results: 53 percent of the journals that got the study with the positive outcome accepted it for publication. Only 14 percent of the journals who got the version with the negative finding accepted it.

One would hope that the social work profession would have taken the findings to heart and cleaned up its act. But alas, no. On the contrary. The Royal Court of Social Work was not pleased when Prof. Epstein pointed out that the emperor had no clothes.

A group of angry journal editors filed an ethics complaint with the National Association of Social Workers. They said it was unethical of Prof. Epstein to fail to get their informed consent before trying to fool them! It could have led to Epstein being drummed out of the NASW. The furious "scholars" were led by one John Schuerman, who was, at the time, editor of the Social Service Review, and a professor at the University of Chicago. As The New York Times explained:

[Schuerman's] journal was not fooled by Dr. Epstein's paper because an alert editor noticed that part of it was copied from an earlier article. … While Dr. Schuerman acknowledges that there are some circumstances in social science research where it is accepted procedure not to obtain informed consent, he said, ''You have to weigh the benefits of the research against the risk of harm to the subjects.'' He added, ''Here the harm was the cost and time to busy professionals, the large numbers of reviewers and staff involved.''

Another cost, Dr. Schuerman noted, was emotional: ''The chagrin and embarrassment of those editors who accepted the article.''

Ultimately NASW decided it was not unethical to point out a naked emperor. But the social work profession wasn't through with Dr. Epstein. NASW threatened to bring him up on new charges – for talking to the press about the old charges!

When I went back to that New York Times story yesterday, it was the first time I'd looked at it in more than 20 years – I'd first seen it when I was researching my book, Wounded Innocents, which first was published in 1990.

Back then, the name John Schuerman meant nothing to me. But in the following years he would join the Chapin Hall Center for Children, an organization prone to that "Chevy Chase" attitude I mentioned above. There, he would lead a team that would produce a series of studies claiming that Intensive Family Preservation Services (IFPS) didn't work. I think the researchers firmly believed it. And I think that Schuerman, like most people in child welfare, really wants to help children. But each study had the same fatal flaw – they failed to study IFPS programs that actually followed the model of the original such program, Homebuilders, in Washington State.

To me, admittedly a mere advocate, it appeared that each study was a more strident attempt to justify the one before. And to one of the leading honest-to-God scholars in the field, Prof. Ray Kirk of the University of North Carolina, the results of Schuerman's biggest study were "a non finding from a failed study."

Several more rigorous evaluations have found that IFPS is successful. Details are in NCCPR Issue Paper 11. But because the Schuerman group said what the child welfare establishment wanted to hear, his work has gotten far more amplification in the social work echo chamber - the very echo chamber Schuerman himself was so desperate to defend in 1988.

None of this means we should be free to retreat into the cop-out of saying, in effect, "since the studies disagree, I'll just believe what I want." Rather, it means that all research must be subjected to rigorous critique and fair competition in the marketplace of ideas. As it happens, Epstein himself has written things with which I strongly disagree (but at least he has a really good sense of humor). But What Epstein's study reveals is that there is no free market of ideas in social work scholarship. Rather, the modern successors to those who, in the 19^th Century, proudly called themselves "child savers" have a near-monopoly in that market; to the detriment of vulnerable children.

We all have biases. Epstein's study reminds us that a Ph-D does not inoculate us against them.

The evidence is in - again

    It's long been known that children left in their own homes whose families receive lots of help to stay together tend to do better than comparably-maltreated children thrown into foster care. Given what we know about foster care, common sense says as much, but there's also a wealth of research. Some of that research is discussed in NCCPR's Issue Papers, particularly Issue Papers 1, 10 and 11.

But nearly two years ago, a researcher at MIT took the research a giant step further. He released the definitive study comparing outcomes of children placed in foster care to comparably-maltreated children left in their home who did not get any special help. The study of 15,000 cases focused not on extreme cases but on those that typically dominate workers caseloads; what I have come to call the "in-between cases." The result: The children left in their own homes were less likely to get pregnant as teenagers, less likely to get in trouble with the law as juveniles – and more likely to be able to get and hold a job. Our detailed analysis of the study is available here. The full study can be found here. (A second study, by University of Minnesota researchers, using different outcome measures came up with the same results – the children left in their own homes did better.)

Last week, Prof. Matthew Fraidin of the University of the District of Columbia's David A. Clarke School of Law pointed out to me that the same MIT researcher is out with another study. This time he was able to examine 23,000 cases, to determine which children were more likely to be arrested as adults, the foster children or comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. Once again, the children left in their own homes did better.

Just imagine how much less foster care there'd be if all the people who throw around the big buzzword in child welfare "evidence-based" really meant it