Children's out-of-home care in Finland, 1993–2020: lifetime risks, expectancies, exit routes, and number of placements for synthetic cohorts

This study employs register-based data on all children born in Finland between 1980 and 2020 (n ≈ 2.75 million) linked to records of out-of-home care (305,045 episodes) and uses discrete-time multistate models to estimate synthetic-cohort lifetime metrics for different calendar years. It finds that the lifetime risk of entering any out-of-home care doubled—from 2.6 % in 1993 to 5.7 % in 2020—with a threefold rise in residential care placements; despite this, average duration of care decreased from 4.2 to 3.5 years, and the likelihood of returning home by age 18 increased from 32 % to 44 %.