Strengthening Permanency Supports

In child welfare, permanency is often treated as a finish line, the moment a youth is adopted, reunified, or placed in guardianship. But for those who have experienced adoption, foster, and kinship care, permanency is not the end of instability, it is the beginning of a lifelong journey. A journey of healing, identity-building, reconnecting, and learning how to hold both past and present.

I know this from experience. As someone adopted as an older youth, I entered permanency carrying years of loss, trauma, and unanswered questions about my identity and my family. Legal permanency gave me stability, but it could not erase the grief I felt for the relationships I had lost or the confusion I carried about who I was supposed to become. Like many adoptees, the hardest parts of healing did not arrive before permanency—they arrived after it.

Permanency Is More Than Placement: It Is Identity, Connection, and Belonging

For many youth, especially youth in foster care, healing requires more than a stable home. It requires access to the people and places that shaped them. It requires answers to identity questions that grow louder with age, and it requires support to navigate relationships that are complex, painful, or unfinished.

Yet too often, systems treat permanency as a closed door. Youth are disconnected from siblings, birth relatives, cultural communities, and even familiar neighborhoods, not because it is unsafe, but because the system was never designed to preserve these ties. These are not small losses. They are the foundations of a young person’s story. Without them, many youth enter adulthood with a fractured sense of identity and a deeper sense of loss.

National guidance, including the Child Welfare Information Gateway, emphasizes that permanency is not just a legal status but a lifelong network of supportive relationships, cultural connections, and emotional grounding. Building on this holistic understanding, a fuller definition of permanency should include:

• Relational permanency encouraging consistent, safe, meaningful connections with siblings, relatives, mentors, and community.
• Cultural and racial identity affirmation especially for youth in transracial or transcultural placements.
• Access to adoption-competent mental health services that understand trauma, loss, and identity development.
• Support for ongoing contact with birth family when it is safe and important to the youth.
• Tools to help youth make sense of their past and integrate it into their future.

These components are not “extras.” They are essential to healing.

Trauma Doesn’t End at Permanency

The trauma many children experience before entering foster care doesn’t disappear once permanency is achieved. Research shows that trauma can resurface during adolescence and early adulthood, the very time when systems tend to step back.

This is especially true for youth eligible for Chafee services. Many are navigating:

• lingering grief
• disrupted relationships
• uncertainty about identity
• cultural disconnection
• unanswered questions about their family history
• transitions into adulthood with limited emotional support

While housing, education, and employment are essential components of Chafee, they cannot replace the emotional and relational supports that shape long-term stability. When identity development and connection are missing, youth step into adulthood without the grounding they need, making independence far more challenging than policy often acknowledges.