Parent–child contact during placement and mental health: A meta‐analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Objective This meta‐analysis aimed to synthesize research findings on the association between contact with biological parents and mental health in the context of out‐of‐home care. Background Although contact with biological parents is the primary intervention for maintaining the relationship with placed children, the consequences on child mental health are still unknown. Method Six electronic databases were searched for published and unpublished studies and dissertations. Results Twenty studies comprising 96 effect sizes ( N = 5,276) were included. Findings from a three‐level random effects meta‐analysis revealed that the combined effect of contact with biological parents on mental health was not significant ( k = 20, u = 96, r = .02). Moderation analyses revealed weaker effect sizes in samples with greater proportions of children who were physically abused or placed in nonrelative foster care. Conversely, parental visitation was more strongly associated with mental health outcomes in samples in which frequency of contact was at least weekly. Conclusion Regular parental visitation (at least weekly) is associated with better mental health outcomes. However, the benefits of parental visitation are reduced among physically abused children and those placed in nonrelative foster care. Implications Moderator analyses suggest that considering parental visitation to be beneficial for children is an oversimplification. Instead, child welfare services should prioritize examination of factors associated with positive parent–child contact for optimal visitation measures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".