Child welfare professionals have a deep and often quiet impact on children’s lives—working to connect families with resources, determining appropriate placements, and responding around the clock to address emergencies.

This analysis of system dysfunction in the U.S. involving legislative powers, child welfare agencies, and peripheral systems, such as juvenile justice, schools, and healthcare, reveals a distinct misalignment in shared values.

This issue of the Future of Children focuses on the first years of life starting with in utero experiences.

This article explores the current state of child rights within the U.S. child welfare, juvenile justice, and special education systems, highlighting concerns that pre-date COVID-19 as well as recent legal implications of the pandemic.

Focusing on three critical facets of the U.S. child welfare system — reporting and investigating maltreatment, placement and other system metrics, and permanency — this Essay explores how the pandemic impacts the child welfare system and how the system should respond.

This report was developed with extensive input from LGBTQ+ young people currently or formerly in foster care, LGBTQ+ young people currently or formerly experiencing homelessness, and direct service workers. It identifies how the pandemic is amplifying some of the risks for LGBTQ+ youth in child welfare systems and propose practices to mitigate them.

This toolkit is designed to give resources and tips to child welfare agencies, other government agencies and nonprofit organizations, so they can better serve all African American grandfamilies.

This toolkit is designed to give resources and tips to child welfare agencies, other government agencies and nonprofit organizations, so they can better serve all American Indian and Alaska Native grandfamilies regardless of child welfare involvement.

This two-page document from the Thrive Coalition - a community of over 30 organizations and individuals dedicated to addressing U.S. Government support for global early childhood development - makes a case for U.S. investment in global early childhood development.

In this report, the authors review how policy has shaped the experiences and outcomes of children in foster care in the U.S., where policy has succeeded, and where it falls short of achieving its goals. The authors then identify opportunities for U.S. federal and state policy to better support the safety, health, and well-being of children in foster care.