Indigenous Kinship Fostering Obligation and Child Psychological Adjustment in Ghanaian Akan Households: A Kinship-Network Fixed-Effects Estimation of Circulation and Caregiver Instability

Akan customary fostering obliges kin to circulate children between households, yet the psychological consequences of this circulation remain theoretically contested and empirically underidentified. Because no primary data were collected, the study is framed as a methodological and theoretical contribution: it specifies the estimand, derives the within-kinship-network fixed-effects estimator, and demonstrates its identification properties using the DHS Program indicator 'Users informed what to do if experienced side effects' (FP_ICHC_W_WDO) across 34 African countries and 105 country-survey observations from 1999 to 2025 (mean 56.118, SD 14.335, range 20.10 in Morocco to 76.10 in Sao Tome and Principe). The indicator serves as a calibration analogue for the caregiver-instability construct, not as a direct measure of child adjustment. The framework proposes that circulation effects are identified only when caregiver instability is modelled as a time-varying mediator within kinship networks, and that between-network comparisons confound circulation with lineage-level selection. The contribution is a transferable identification strategy for indigenous fostering research, together with explicit boundary conditions under which the strategy fails.