Caseworker documentation of mothers in foster care: A case study in California

Young people in foster care frequently experience early parenting, and U.S. law requires the documentation of parents in care. The extent to which the child protection system (CPS) has accurately collected information on parents in care remains largely unknown and has ramifications for the planning and delivery of services. Using California as a case study, this study documented young mothers in care using birth records, determined the proportion of mothers correctly identified in CPS records, and compared characteristics and placements of mothers who were or were not identified. All mothers aged 15–21 years documented by vital birth records (2014 and 2019) were probabilistically linked to CPS records, yielding 3199 mothers in care. We compared mothers who were or were not identified in CPS records using bivariate statistics. A chi-square test for trends examined differences in documentation over time. A third of mothers were not identified as such in CPS records (n = 1136). The proportion of mothers identified by caseworkers rose from 50 % in 2014 to 71.5 % in 2019 (p