Out-of-home care for children in Finland has doubled 

Researchers use demographic tools to improve monitoring of child welfare trends

• Child welfare: Out-of-home care for children in Finland has doubled since 1993, with about six percent expected to experience it at least once in childhood.
• Research methods: Researchers used demographic tools to track children's living arrangements and assess the duration and stability of out-of-home care.
• Care trends: The rise in out-of-home placements is concerning, particularly in residential care, while the expected duration of care has decreased from 4.2 years to 3.5 years since the early 1990s.
• Return rates: The likelihood of children returning home by age 18 improved from 32 percent to 44 percent, despite rising placement rates.

 

Out-of-home care is the last resort child welfare intervention, where a child is removed from their home and placed in alternative care to protect their well-being. The reasons for these placements are complex but may involve abuse, neglect, or mental health and behavioral problems by either the parents or the children.

Measuring out-of-home care at the population level is challenging due to the complexity of the child welfare system. Aapo Hiilamo and Mikko Myrskylä at the MPIDR, along with colleagues at the University of Helsinki, used demographic methods to better describe out-of-home care at the population level.

“Trends in out-of-home care are usually monitored by counting the number of children living outside their parents' home at a given point in time. However, these metrics can be misleading because they don’t account for differences in age structure or important aspects such as the duration or stability of care, or the possibility of family reunification. We aimed to address these challenges,” explains Hiilamo, the study's lead author.

New Metrics Offer a Nuanced View of Child Welfare

The researchers tracked the daily living arrangements of all children in Finland throughout their childhood, calculating their probabilities of moving into and out of out-of-home care by age and year.

For each year from 1993 to 2020 they calculated several metrics: the proportion of children who would have at least one out-of-home care episode, the expected duration of care, and the likelihood of returning to their family. These metrics were calculated as if the conditions that year would have lasted throughout their childhood.

“It is important to measure many aspects of out-of-home care at once. We are interested not only in how many children enter out-of-home care, but also in their care trajectories: what type of care is provided, how long they stay, and whether they are ever reunited with their families. Our methodology provides a more nuanced picture of out-of-home care systems,” Hiilamo says.

Rising trends in Finland raise questions

Given the conditions in 2020, around six percent of children are expected to be placed in out-of-family care at least once during their childhood— a twofold increase since 1993. This rise was mostly due to an increase in residential care, although the risk of being placed in foster family also grew. 

Despite the increased risk of placement, the expected duration of care declined from 4.2 in early 1990s to 3.5 years in 2020. Additionally, the probability of sustained return to home by age 18 increased from 32 to 44 percent.

“The rise in out-of-home care in general and in residential care in particularly is both concerning and puzzling. Known risk factors, such as juvenile delinquency and alcohol consumption, have not changed in parallel, and similar trends are not seen across other Nordic countries. Further research is needed to understand why Finland has such high rates of out-of-home placements,” explains Hiilamo.

Demographic methods offer new insights for child welfare research

The multistate models used in this study can be easily adapted for use in other countries and in other areas of child welfare. For example, they could be used to study transitions between referral to child and youth welfare services and the interventions provided, or the risk of running away from foster care.

“Demographic research often focused on older populations due to aging societies, but these methods are equally valuable to studying children and youth. Demographic tools help quantify differences in child and youth welfare services across time and space, and thanks to new software developed at the MPIDR, these tools are now more accessible,” concludes Hiilamo.