This comprehensive manual provides an overview of child abandonment and its prevention in Europe, exploring the extent of child abandonment, possible reasons behind this phenomenon, the consequences of abandonment, and good practices in terms of prevention. For the purposes of the EU Daphne-funded project, child abandonment is defined in two ways, namely open and secret abandonment. Country specific in-depth reviews of child abandonment and its prevention are provided for 10 countries and results from an EU-wide survey analyzed.

This document is a Slovakian language summary brochure of the Manual of Best Practice titled ‘Child Abandonment and its Prevention in Europe,’ specific to child abandonment in Slovakia.

Utilizing the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children, this paper from Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development Volume 76, Issue 4 examines critical components and current characteristics of alternative care for children in low‐resource countries.

This paper is based on research into the transition of young people leaving public care in Romania.

This paper discusses findings from a qualitative longitudinal study which explored the process of leaving long-stay institutional state care in Romania during 2002–4, a period at the heart of accelerated EU-enforced childcare reform.

The aim of this article is two-fold. Firstly, to present a critical discursive analysis of young people's accounts of themselves in the transition from care. Secondly, to shed light on three different ways of making the transition from care; transition through a break with the past after moving out, transition through continuing change and transition as a way of dealing with the risk of further problems in their lives.

This paper explores the research evidence from England and France on the mental health of young people aging out of care and into adulthood.

This article, from the Children and Youth Services Review special issue on ‘Young People's Transitions from Care to Adulthood’ examines the school performance and psychosocial wellbeing of care leavers in Sweden.

The authors of this article carried out a follow-up study of 143 young adults leaving kinship care. They assessed the young adults’ transition to adulthood with interviews and questionnaires. A small part of the sample presented serious problems of social exclusion. Seventy percent had found employment or were in higher education. The youth had frequently suffered the loss of foster carers and lack of support.

Few local authorities had elaborated programmes or routines for care leaving. Many small municipalities had few young people in care, which made it difficult to organise elaborated programmes for care leaving. Manager’s expected a rapid and linear transition to adulthood. Little awareness of the yo-yo transition pattern common for other young people. Managers were worried that continued contact with social services would lead to young people being dependant on support. Only 6% of managers had any information of young people’s whereabouts, once they had left care.