Adolescents often get sent back to foster care even when their parents haven't done anything wrong.
April 24, 2026
Original Paper
Child Maltreatment and Reentry of Adolescents Following Reunification in the USA
SSRN · 6636103
The Takeaway
Reentry into the foster care system for teenagers is frequently driven by systemic factors or behavioral issues rather than new incidents of abuse. Most people assume that a child returning to state care means the home was unsafe or a parent failed again. Data shows that a significant portion of these cases occur without any new report of maltreatment. This suggests that the support systems for reunified families are failing to handle the complex needs of adolescents as they transition back home. Policy focus needs to shift from purely monitoring safety to providing intensive behavioral resources for families in crisis.
From the abstract
Adolescents experience elevated reentry rates into child welfare-supervised out-of-home care following reunification. Limited research has explored the pathways contributing to these outcomes and not accounted for the distinct reasons youth enter care. This study uses the Report and Placement Integrated Data Set, created by merging individual-level records from NCANDS and AFCARS across 51 states, to examine reunification outcomes for 16,261 youth who experienced their first foster care episode a