The Huffington Post has begun “30 Adoption Portraits in 30 Days,” a series designed to give a voice to people with widely varying adoption experiences, including birth parents, adoptees, adoptive parents, foster parents, waiting, adoptive parents, and other touched by adoption.

The USA-based National Child Traumatic Stress Network has recently released a second edition of the Child Welfare Trauma Training Toolkit, which is part of the Child Welfare Trauma Training course. The course assists those in the field of child welfare who wish to learn more about child welfare and trauma.

This Resource Guide was developed to support service providers in the US in their work with parents, caregivers, and their children to prevent child abuse and neglect and promote child and family well-being. The Resource Guide was created primarily to support community-based child abuse prevention professionals who work to prevent child maltreatment and promote well-being. However, others such as policymakers, parent educators, family support workers, health-care providers, program administrators, teachers, child care providers, mentors, and clergy also will find the resources useful.

This Child Welfare Information Gateway bulletin for professionals in the US discusses what chronic neglect is and reviews ways to work with families experiencing chronic neglect, including critical elements of successful casework practice, examples of what agencies are doing, and ways agencies can integrate child welfare approaches to chronic neglect with prevention and early intervention efforts.

The 2013 KIDS COUNT Data Book provides a detailed picture of how children are faring in the United States. In addition to ranking states on overall child well-being, the Data Book ranks states in four domains: Economic Well-Being, Education, Health, and Family and Community.

The Action Plan on Children in Adversity is the first government wide strategic guidance for U.S. Government international assistance for children. The goal of the Action Plan is to achieve a world in which all children grow up within protective family care and free from deprivation, exploitation, and danger. It has three principal objectives, with Objective 2 specifically focusing on the importance of promoting family care and prevention of family-child separation.

This literature review summarizes the research on children who live apart from their parents and identifies gaps in knowledge regarding this vulnerable population. This literature review was developed as a step toward designing the National Survey of Children in Nonparental Care, a nationally representative telephone survey of adults caring for these children.

Although the relationship between child sexual abuse and mental disorders life has been well established, the health consequences of other forms of child maltreatment, including physical abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect have not been systematically examined. This study summarizes the evidence relating to the possible relationship between child physical abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect, and subsequent mental and physical health outcomes.

This paper provides insight into child protection in the context of coordinated action, the architecture of U.S. government assistance, the state of evidence-base, development of appropriate research framework, practice and policy, ethical considerations, and capacity development and knowledge transfer for those advocating for children outside of family care. Recommendations are made to consider how current operational contexts, collaborative relationships and learning-knowledge can be united to focus on the various categories of children outside of family care.

Recognizing the need for evidence to inform policies, strategies, and programs to care for vulnerable children, the U.S. Government convened an Evidence Summit on Protecting Children Outside of Family Care on December 12–13, 2011, in Washington, D.C., USA. This paper summarizes the background and methods for the acquisition and evaluation of the evidence used to achieve the goals of the Summit.