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.

This paper presents the historical background for the development of child care in the Nordic countries, it presents some basic figures on child care take and take up of leave schemes as well as figures on child poverty in the Nordic countries.

Abstract

This paper uses comparisons of child benefit packages in the European Union and Central and Eastern European and Confederation of Independent States (CEE/CIS) countries derived using model family methods.

This paper highlights a number of recurrent issues that help to illuminate and explain the differences that persist between France and Germany in spite of recent reform efforts in child & family policies and evaluates the success of these policies and whether they have achieved their desired effects on mothers' employment patterns, especially those of qualified female workers.

Parental leave and early childhood education and care have gained a high profile in child and family policy fields, and both have been the subject of substantial cross-national mapping, describing and comparing their main features across a range of countries. This article provides overviews on parental leave and early childhood services in affluent countries, and reflections on this mapping.

Child care and early education policies may not only raise average achievement but may also be of special benefit for less advantaged children, in particular if programs are high quality. We test whether high quality child care is equalizing using rich longitudinal data from two comparison countries, Denmark and the United States. 

A comparative analysis of child welfare systems in 10 countries identifies three broad functional orientations – child protection, family service and child development.