Consent Issues in Foster Care Posted on February 28, 2006 John Landsverk (bio) talks about some of the complications in obtaining consent for children in foster care to participate in research.

Who's the parent when the child is in the custody of the court? It's not often clear. Unless the child has been emancipated or unless the parental rights have been severed, that child is, it is still that parent's responsibility, but temporary custody has been taken. Anyway, those are difficult issues.

We have about 18 years of experience in dealing with this. We tend to over-consent. We will consent a biological parent even though the child is in foster care, and we have moved toward getting biological parent consent, substitute parent consent, and assent by the child.

We also have to get court orders when we deal with kids that are in out-of-home care or under substitute kinds of circumstances. There there's been a shift from in the early days. I'd get a class court order that says I can do it to everybody that fits in this. No longer will our judge do that, and that's fine, so we now have to have individual court orders. We've worked it out so that we can easily and efficiently do that with the judge, and usually what the juvenile court judge requires is that we have shown due diligence in an attempt to find the biological parent, and if we can't, then we don't have to necessarily have that consent by the biological parent.

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