
Happy New Year 2022 to all our dear readers!
Frankly, we can’t believe that COVID continues into 2022. The foster care community should not allow COVID to freeze them into inaction.
Life needs to go on and foster kids need to be cared for, even more as COVID continues into 2022.
To prospective foster parents we say that start the process of enquiring on our platform. From the time you start a conversation with a foster care professional to getting trained and licensed it will take about six months. The COVID situation is expected to become endemic i.e. it’ll become another strain of flu. We do hope and pray that this is what happens. In any case, prospective foster parents need to say “yes” before a child is placed with them. That is you can always say “No” after being licensed. Don’t delay the all digital StartFosterCare process because of COVID stresses that we all are feeling.
Meanwhile, Foster Care Scholars have been studying the COVID stress and its impact on Foster Care. Here is a summary of three articles from this academic research relevant to the mission of StartFosterCare. We hope this summary is useful to all current and prospective foster parents and foster care professionals in the field. You are not alone in feeling as you do.
1.Foster Parental stress during COVID: The article by Miller,Cooley and Mihalec-Adkins (2020) in the Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal finds that (1) Married foster parents experienced less stress than single foster parents during COVID (3) Those parents who reported financial insecurity were also more COVID stressed. Surprisingly kinship foster parents including grandparents formed part of this category. (2) Those foster parents who reported their own poor mental health felt more stress due to COVID compared to those who reported “good” or “excellent” mental health. Read the full Miller,Cooley and Mihalec-Adkins (2020) paper.
2. Professional and Foster Parent COVID Stresses: Scholars from Kentucky studied 357 professionals and foster parents. They found 15 different themes that folks mentioned that caused stress in their work and lives during COVID. The top three themes were (1) Change in Routines which was observed in 25% of the responses. (2) Isolation & Loss of Social Support (14%) and School Issues (12%). Here is part of the Table 1 from the authors work.

Read the full article at the NIH website from Whitt-Woosley, Sprang, and Eslinger (2021) from Child Abuse and Neglect Journal.
3. Social Media Reddit Study–Foster Family Concerns and Needs before and during COVID : We liked this novel study because it used social media platform Reddit to study comments from 11,830 Reddit users. The comments were textually and quantitatively analyzed and here is a summary from Table 2 of the study that speaks to the StartFosterCare mission.
Topic | Before COVID | During COVID |
Becoming a foster parent | -Approval of foster care licensure -Completion of licensure requirements -Anxious or annoyed about slow licensure process | -Anxious about additional delays in licensing -Frustration over postponed foster parent training classes -Licensure process going all online |
Permanency | -Anxious about additional delays in licensing -Frustration over postponed foster parent training classes -Licensure process going all online | -Pursuing adoption or legal guardianship -Termination of parental rights related to children’s age -Ongoing family separation between foster children and their biological families -Pandemic-specific challenges as waiting for permanency |
Activities for foster children | -Ideas for everyday activities and projects -Suggestions for activities to address sensory-related behavior -Activities to help connect with foster children | -Ideas for everyday activities and projects -Suggestions for activities to address sensory-related behavior -Activities to help connect with foster children |
See the full article by Lee,Chang, and Ammar (2021) Child Abuse and Neglect Journal (2021) at the NIH website.
So summarize, yes COVID has been very stressful for the foster care community and folks have been feeling many of the similar COVID stresses. However, we cannot freeze into inaction because the needs of foster kids are rising across the US.