The authors explore approaches, challenges, solutions, and recommendations offered by child welfare workers in Canada on remote communication with children/youth regarding safety and on managing parent–child access during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article explores how the monitoring of foster homes in Norway is experienced by children and youths who have been exposed to what they consider abusive behaviour by foster parents. Using a thematic narrative theoretical framework, the article shows that a common narrative in the youths’ accounts is a story of mistrust towards social workers and monitoring officers, which relates to a general mistrust towards the child welfare service.

Young people who age out of state care are at risk of a range of negative outcomes. In England, national data provides only five indicators of care leavers’ lives and there are no measures of how young people themselves feel about their transition to adulthood. To fill this gap a new survey to measure subjective wellbeing was coproduced with 31 care leavers. The survey was then distributed by 21 local authorities and completed by 1804 care leavers.

This qualitative study explores the emotional and social experiences of 10 children, aged 6–11, residing in foster care in Italy before adoption for almost three years. Through semi-structured interviews, the study underlined the needs and expectations of these children, highlighting the necessity for a deeper reflection on the role of foster homes as nurturing and educational communities.

This article analyzes ethical issues arising in transreligious foster care placements in relation to foster children’s needs regarding religious socialization and identification. Applying Urban Walker’s expressive-collaborative framework to 30 qualitative interviews with foster parents, foster children, parents, and professionals, the authors elaborate and apply a three-level reflection on Christian foster parents’ ethics of care in everyday practice of foster care.

Group climate in residential youth care is considered to be essential for treatment of youth and young adults. Various instruments exist to measure quality of living group climate, but some are lengthy, use complicated wording, which make them difficult to fill out by youth and individuals with a mild intellectual disability. The present study based in the Netherlands describes the development and rationale for the Group Climate Instrument—Revised (GCI-R).

This article analyses the search strategies of first families in Bolivia contesting the separation of their children through transnational adoption. These first parents’ claims to visibility and acknowledgement have remained largely ignored by adoption policy and scholarship, historically privileging the perspectives of actors in adoptive countries, such as adoptive parents and adoption professionals.

Family-centred practice (FCP) has been suggested as a best practice for treating youth with emotional and behavioural difficulties in residential care. In this preregistered global systematic review, the authors examined how FCP is operationalized and measured in residential youth care and which family outcomes are associated with FCP.

This article looks at the role of the State of India in ensuring the wellbeing of those it has the responsibility to protect. These include people who have suffered violence, indignity, hunger and life-threatening circumstances. The five-year planning of state and district plans have utilised more resources than it has produced outcomes and output. In this article the authors have compiled lessons learned from strategies that can enable duty holders to emerge as more responsible actors during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

This is a corporal punishment country report for Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the Law on Protection of Child Rights 2019 prohibits corporal punishment in alternative care settings and in penal institutions.