With notable and growing exceptions, there is a dearth of research on mechanisms by which youth in foster care build resilience and achieve positive outcomes. We report on data from an interview study with young adults exiting or recently exited foster care in Maryland (N=15) designed to understand what facilitates their engagement with courts. Our findings indicate that despite challenges of ?being in foster care?, youth found ways to pursue their goals and make their voices heard through developing stable relationships with supportive adults (including judges, caseworkers, or lawyers) and demanding that child welfare professionals ?speak to me not at me.? Youth indicated that their needs, capabilities, and goals changed as they matured and as their circumstances changed. Such changes helped them find their voices but also created tensions within their child welfare system interactions. This led us to develop the theory of adaptive responsivity, according to which child welfare stakeholders should respond appropriately to developmental and circumstantial changes to help child-welfare involved youth face difficult circumstances and thrive. Such responses include providing developmentally and situationally appropriate information and decision-making power to youth in their own cases as well as opportunities to weigh in on systems change.

除了显着且越来越多的例外情况，目前还缺乏关于寄养青年如何增强复原力并取得积极成果的机制的研究。我们报告了对马里兰州退出或最近退出寄养家庭的年轻人 (N=15) 进行的访谈研究的数据，旨在了解什么有助于他们与法庭的接触。我们的研究结果表明，尽管面临“寄养”的挑战，青少年仍然找到了实现自己目标的方法，并通过与支持性成年人（包括法官、个案工作者或律师）建立稳定的关系以及要求儿童福利专业人员“发言”来表达自己的声音对我不是对我。？年轻人表示，随着他们的成熟和环境的变化，他们的需求、能力和目标也发生了变化。这些变化帮助他们找到了自己的声音，但也在他们的儿童福利系统互动中造成了紧张。这促使我们发展了适应性响应理论，根据该理论，儿童福利利益相关者应该对发展和环境变化做出适当的反应，以帮助参与儿童福利的青少年面对困难的环境并茁壮成长。此类应对措施包括向青少年提供适合其发展和情况的信息和决策权，以及参与系统变革的机会。