When youths get close to aging out of foster care, it’s important to plan for emancipation. Aging out of foster care — or emancipating — is the termination of court jurisdiction over youths formally in foster care.

Some parents surrender custody because a teen's behavior is out of control or because of escalating family conflict. In fact, “child behavior” was the reason given for 46% of all foster care removals of youth older than 12 — and the only reason for out-of-home placements for 28% of teens.

On their trek north towards the United States, some 19,000 migrant children have crossed the dangerous jungles that sprawl the border between Panama and Colombia so far this year, the United Nations children's agency UNICEF said October 11, 2021.

Nearly 170 Haitian children arrived in Port-au-Prince with their parents October 9, 2021, after being expelled from Cuba mainly and the U.S., according to UNICEF. Most of the children are from southwestern Haiti and left two to three weeks after the August earthquake in an attempt to reach the U.S.  

Several UN agencies issued a joint statement calling for greater protection and a comprehensive regional approach for Haitians on the move, including accompanied and unaccompanied and separated children.

The U.S. and Canada are starting to face their history of forcing indigenous children into abusive boarding schools. Here's everything you need to know:

What was the school's goal?

Simply put, cultural genocide. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the U.S. government and religious leaders used compulsory boarding schools to force young Native Americans to give up the languages and cultures of their ancestors, which were considered self-evidently inferior to a Christian, Western-style upbringing. Boarding schools were made mandatory for Native American children in 1891. This often meant forced separation from their families and communities. And because these schools were underfunded, crowded, and often unsanitary, thousands of students died of disease. Canada also coerced at least 150,000 indigenous children into a network of residential schools that were mostly run by the Catholic Church; last June, researchers uncovered 1,148 unmarked graves on the grounds of three schools. U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo people whose maternal grandparents were forced to board, has opened an investigation into America's boarding-school policy. "This attempt to wipe out Native identity, language, and culture," she wrote in a June Washington Post article, has "never been appropriately addressed."

The American Bar Association’s policymaking body has voted in favor of a resolution supporting the U.S. Interior Department as it works to uncover the troubled legacy of federal boarding schools that sought to assimilate Indigenous youth into white society.

Lawyers representing children in U.S. immigration custody asked a federal court on Monday to order the release of migrant teenagers from two emergency housing sites in Texas where minors have reported mental distress, substandard conditions, prolonged stays and inadequate services.

Former Canadian senator Murray Sinclair and a group representing survivors of the Sixties Scoop are calling for a federal inquiry into the actions and policies of governments that led to thousands of Indigenous children being taken from their homes over four decades and placed with non-Indigenous families.

Kisha Supernant has brought radar technology to the search for burial sites in Canada while she works to reshape her profession’s relationship with Indigenous communities.