This comprehensive child welfare resource provides U.S. state and national data on child maltreatment, foster care, kinship caregiving, permanency, and older youth in care. The data are essential to help policymakers understand how many children and youth come in contact with the child welfare system, and why.

For nearly 30 years, U.S. federal legislation shaping adoption has remained largely unchanged, even as expectations around privacy, youth voice, and family support have significantly evolved. This toolkit offers practical strategies and resources to modernize policy and practice, centering young people’s agency across consent, privacy, family recruitment, and post-adoption support.

The U.S. government’s foreign assistance reductions and rescissions in 2025 are reshaping the global policy and financing landscape for children in adversity. This report, drawing on consultations with over 200 stakeholders, outlines strategies across four pillars to mitigate harm from the cuts and strengthen local capacity to support vulnerable children, families, and communities.

This historical overview documents milestones in the evolution of the U.S. government’s work to support the development, care, and protection of children globally, as well as coordination efforts across the U.S. government to promote a holistic response to the needs of vulnerable children. It draws on a review of publicly available documentation and conversations with numerous United States Agency for International Development (USAID) staff and partners involved in work on behalf of highly vulnerable children over more than three decades.

This report contains the findings from a nationally representative study conducted in 2025 by Barna Group of U.S. Christians to better understand U.S. Christian beliefs around and support for orphanages, children’s homes and other forms of residential care for children.

This review examines research on how the COVID-19 pandemic affected older youth with foster care experience in the United States, finding that most studies were descriptive and highlighted major disruptions in areas like housing, education, employment, mental health, and relationships. It shows that certain groups—such as youth of color, LGBTQ youth, and females—were especially impacted, and calls for stronger support systems and policies to better protect foster youth in future crises.

This article describes how a new bipartisan U.S. congressional report finds that children with mental health needs are often incarcerated in juvenile detention centers across the country—sometimes without having committed any crime—because community-based mental health care and placement options are severely limited or unavailable.

This study compares the role of advocacy coalitions in forming child protection policies in the United States and Indonesia, looking at the problems that arise from their different political and governance systems. The findings show how important it is to improve inter-agency collaboration, strengthen local governance, and get more political support to fix the problems with child protection services

This study examined the relationship between disability type and service receipt among U.S. transition-age youth aging out of foster care, a population in which 53% have a diagnosed disability, across all U.S. states, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico.

This article describes how the U.S.