The coronavirus pandemic and the new restrictions in place to limit the spread of the infection have presented several difficulties for foster families in California, including how to manage visits between foster children and their families.

In this opinion piece for Bloomberg, Francis Wilkinson discusses findings from a recent U.S. government review of the separation of children from their families by Department of Homeland Security, including Customs and Border Patrol, the Office of Field Operations and Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the U.S. border with Mexico.

"Hundreds of thousands of vulnerable U.S. children could face a heightened risk of abuse and neglect as coronavirus-related school closures keep them at home and away from the nation’s biggest group of hotline tipsters: educators," says this article from USA Today.

This article from NPR accompanies a brief radio segment highlighting the difficulties faced by families with children in foster care during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the suspension of in-person visits between parents and their children. 

New York City's child welfare agency is “'aggressively' hunting for space to house [foster] youth who are sick or who need to be moved away from ill caretakers," according to this article from the Chronicle of Social Change.

In this segment for National Public Radio (NPR), a parent of a child in foster care and several child welfare professionals describe how they are navigating in-person visits, emergency removals and foster placements in the time of the COVD-19 pandemic.

This article from the Chronicle of Social Change offers suggestions for how children in foster care can remain connected with their families during the COVID-19 pandemic when social distancing is required and in-person meetings are not safe to conduct.

In this story for the March 2020 issue of the Atlantic, David Brooks writes about U.S. society's "shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families" and the "devastation it has wrought," including how it "ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor."

This article from the Guardian shines a light on the "nearly one million 'left-behind' Venezuelan children whose parents have been forced to migrate, leaving their offspring in the care of grandparents, aunts, siblings, neighbours or sometimes even completely alone."

"Children in Maryland's foster care system are languishing in psychiatric hospitals even when they no longer require hospital care," says this segment of NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday. "The state doesn't have enough space to place them elsewhere."