| Sumario: | This article reports on a study comparing the performance of a professional foster care program and two specialized programs in Cook County, Illinois, with random samples of kinship and nonrelative family foster homes. Professional and kinship foster care consistently outperformed the specialized programs and the nonrelative care in terms of stability, sibling placement, restrictiveness of care, and proximity to the child's community of origin. While the former two program types also do slightly better than the latter in achieving permanent living situations, the professional foster care program had difficulty moving children to adoptive homes or subsidized guardianship. Implications of these differences for the evolution of family foster care in the next century are considered. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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