PEDIATRIC- Mental and Physical Health of Children in Foster Care

Article review: Mental and Physical Health of Children in Foster Care
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Abstract
The paper’s intent is to give a brief outlook of this article which elaborates on the Mental and Physical Health of Children in Foster Care. In the article Kristin Turney and Christopher Wildeman illustrate the challenges which children under foster care go through during their stay and the behavioral change after foster care. The authors try to come up with a connection to show how foster care attributes to the general development of children regarding physical and mental health. They further elaborate on the research methodology used to come up with the data which enables them to come to a conclusion on the effects of foster care by comparing foster care children and other children in the general population. This paper, therefore, tries to review the article and summarize the central concept conveyed and finally the research method used is analyzed to prove the validity in coming up with the arrived conclusion.

Article Review: Mental and Physical Health of Children in Foster Care
Wildeman and Turney 2016 in the article Mental and Physical Health of Children in Foster Care, they state that in every year, 1 % of the US children spend time in the foster care. They further illustrate that children who spend their time in the foster care endure a myriad of problems which may arise due to the maltreatment they incurred or other risk factors related to their placement which include poverty, parental drug, and alcohol abuse, disadvantages in the neighborhood and epigenetics.

The relation of foster children and conditions such as depression, anxiety, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and conduct problems is seemed to go hand in hand compared to their counterparts who are raised by both parents. Furthermore, the children place in foster care were associated with future problems such as struggling to catch up in school, trouble in finding employment and abuse of drugs during adolescence and early adulthood.
The authors admit having less existence of data up to date to make it possible to compare the mental and physical health of children who are in foster care with other general children population in the United States. It’s also impossible to put to comparison the mental and physical health of the children in foster care units with the kids from specific family types or children from the economically disadvantaged families. For these reason of limitation of data, the authors had to rely on data from the National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) which is a national representative sample of non-institutionalized children in the United States. The NSCH gives an expressive overview of the health of children in foster care in comparison with those not under a foster family.
The authors conclude from this data in NSCH that most of the children placed under foster care develop various complications such as displaying mental problems compared to their counterparts not placed under foster care. For instance, foster care children were apt to possess a learning disability and thrice susceptible to have ADD or ADHD. From the article, we infer that foster care does not help the children but greatly induce mental and physical health problems which are not the primary objective of foster care.
Despite the limited data, the article plays a significant role in coming up with facts relating the foster care to mental and physical health problems associated with children who participate in the program. The decision by the authors to use the NSCH was a constructive move in obtaining the data concerned with the kids under foster care since the data is correct and not biased. The authors successfully use the cross-sectional data in providing a revealing portrait of the health of children in foster care about their counterparts. Their findings rhyme with other researchers hence proving the validity of their article. For instance, Chipungu, and Bent-Goodley (2004) in their Journal of Children, Families and Foster Care they argue that children in foster care may face emotional and psychological challenges due to alienation with the natural parents and exhibit behavioral problems imparted by the history. This agrees with the authors of this article.
To conclude from my perspective, this article makes a great contribution in exposing that children who are in foster care are in noticeable worse mental and physical health compared to normal children. This is backed by the Practitioner Review by Leve et al. (2012) where it buttresses this concept on foster children describing them to have behavioral deficits, brain, and neurological impairment and finally being anti-social.
References
Chipungu, S. S., & Bent-Goodley, T. B. (2004). Meeting the challenges of contemporary foster care. The future of children, 75-93.
Leve, L. D., Harold, G. T., Chamberlain, P., Landsverk, J. A., Fisher, P. A., & Vostanis, P. (2012). Practitioner review: children in foster care–vulnerabilities and evidence‐based interventions that promote resilience processes. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 53(12), 1197-1211.
Turney, K., & Wildeman, C. (2016). Mental and Physical Health of Children in Foster Care. Pediatrics, e20161118.