When children enter the foster care system, there's a reason. But what brings in the adults who open their homes to children in crisis? And how can more people be encouraged to take that step? Connect for Kids' Rob Capriccioso reports.

Making it on your own isn't easy -- but children aging out of foster care have it especially tough. They are more likely than their peers to face mental health and substance abuse problems, sexually transmitted diseases, involvement with the juvenile justice system and difficulty completing high school. These are among the first findings from Chapin Hall's longitudinal study of youth aging out of foster care.

Foster care failures often make grim headlines. Foster care successes sometimes emerge as personal stories of success against the odds. But not nearly enough is known about which elements of the foster care experience help or hinder children. Cecilia Garcia reports on a new study that looks to 'graduates' of foster care for direction on improving the system.

This week, Kate Mattos, the president of our board of directors, inaugurates a new occasional column designed to give you a look inside Connect For Kids.

This Urban Institute report looks at the changing characteristics of parents who have adopted children from the foster care system to help agencies identify and recruit adoptive parents. Of the children adopted in 1999, 56 percent were adopted by foster parents and 20 percent by relatives--a radical shift in child welfare practice, since until recently foster parents and relatives were rarely given opportunities to adopt. Children still awaiting adoption tend to be closest in characteristics to the children adopted by relatives--older, male and black. Prospective adoptive parents who have no prior relationship with the child are slightly more likely than foster parents to adopt older and minority children, but are significantly less likely than foster parents or relatives to adopt children with special needs.

Children in foster care are a particularly vulnerable population, often with serious and complex physical and mental health issues. This study finds that despite national assessment guidelines, many counties do not have comprehensive policies or routine practices that address all children entering out-of-home care, so primary care providers should be educated about their specific problems because they may be the only practitioners evaluating the children.

The Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care has background papers on the legal framework and financing structures of foster care.

Key to providing quality foster care for kids is recruiting and supporting good foster parents. True Insights offers a model marketing campaign that dramatically increased calls from prospective foster parents in NYC.

State teams are already trying out different strategies to improve the potential of kinship care for kids who are removed from parents' care--including interviewing children in shelter placements to identify possible relative caregivers in Oklahoma, using a specific form to ask biological parents for information about possible kinship placements at the time of removal in Washington, and having Child Protective Services investigation workers ask parents, "Whom do you call when you need help with your children?" in Utah. (See the document, Kinship Care and the Breakthrough Series Collaborative.)

The Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) and the Casey Family Programs National Center for Resource Family Support developed these comprehensive guidelines for professionals on how to prevent abuse in out-of-home placements for kids in foster care, and respond to and investigate allegations of abuse and neglect in foster families.