ABSTRACT Prior work suggests that children who are supported by their extended family kinship network experience fewer internalizing problems, with most of this support coming from the maternal side of the family. However, less is known about the unique contributions to well‐being associated with maternal versus paternal extended family support among children in foster care, a gap in the literature this study sought to address. Participants included 336 children (six to 13 years) from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. Interviews with case workers and file reviews were used to measure support from the kinship network, and the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS) measure was used to assess children's longitudinal internalizing problems. Results from a Hierarchical Linear Model applied to the data indicated that both paternal and maternal kin support predicted lower internalizing problems trajectories as main effects, along with the interaction between both forms of support. Probing the interaction, optimal protection from internalizing problems was observed for children with higher levels of support from both the paternal and the maternal extended family. These results support efforts to engage both maternal and paternal kinship networks for children entering foster care.
Davenport et al. (Thu,) studied this question.