The authors of this article review the evidence base on short- and long-term risks for children during early childhood development (ECD, defining this from prenatal to 8 years of age) and present evidence-based mitigating program and policy actions that may reduce these risks.

This Call to Action outlines some of the impacts of both displacement and COVID-19 that are threatening the positive development of many young children around the world. It calls for governments and donors honor existing commitments, ensure inclusion of young children and families in public systems and take FIVE immediate actions.

This joint position statement calls for prioritising investment in early childhood services in light of the COVID-19 crisis.

In line with principles outlined by the Early Childhood Development Action Network and the International Task Force for Teachers for Education 2030, the following are five key actions that governments, civil society organizations, and funding agencies must take to support the early childhood workforce to ensure continuity and quality in efforts to promote nurturing care.

This brief report explores the impact that Covid-19 has had on fostering households in the United Kingdom.

This package of materials from Changing the Way We Care features guidance and tools for case management and virtual monitoring during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Esta guía se desarrolló para ayudar al equipo psicosocial a realizar un seguimiento virtual de los NNA y las familias durante la pandemia de COVID-19.

This guidance was developed to support case workers to conduct virtual monitoring of children and families within their caseload throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Este documento presenta recomendaciones para garantizar que los procedimientos del mecanismo de prevención de la institucionalización continúen siendo efectivos o, en algunos casos, se fortalezcan durante la pandemia de la COVID-19.

Esta guía debe considerarse para: niños, niñas y adolescentes que actualmente viven en un entorno de protección residencial, lo cual incluye a aquellos que han sido colocados antes y después del inicio de la pandemia de COVID-19.

Esta guía debe considerarse para los niños, niñas y adolescentes que viven con su familia que puede estar en una situación de vulnerabilidad o estar en riesgo de separación y también los niños, niñas o adolescentes que se han reunificado recientemente con sus familias, incluidos aquellos(as) que salieron rápidamente del cuidado residencial debido a la pandemia de la COVID-19.

This report from UNFPA explores harmful practices affecting women and girls around the world, focusing on three particular practices: female genital mutilation (FGM), child marriage, and son preference.

In this video, Grace Mwangi shares key lessons from her experience working in community-based social work with children and families at risk of separation in Kenya.

This document sets out the draftadvocacy messages and recommendations for donors, governments, and civil society, which were prioritised by participants of the December 2019 Learning Session co-hosted by the Coalition for Children Affected by AIDS and the World Health Organization to develop an evidence-informed advocacy agenda on adolescent mothers affected by HIV and their children.

This report from UNICEF explores the situation of children during the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, including the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. It outlines UNICEF's response to the crisis and presents a global call to action.

This article explores the significant emotional and physical health needs of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in the European Union, recommending a stepwise approach to delivery of services so as not to overwhelm them.

This study investigated process and outcomes of the Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH) for Young Children and for Adolescents programs implemented as part of routine service delivery in postconflict settings.

This document is a summary of three papers on how to effectively support children who have exited armed forces and armed groups and contains actionable recommendations at the end to stimulate thinking and action to assist these most vulnerable children and their communities.

For this study, semi-structured interviews with twelve birth parents and twenty six permanent carers took place in New South Wales, Australia. Inductive thematic analysis was used to identify a pattern in the nature of adult relationships. The themes of 1) getting to know each other; 2) making family time; and 3) a shared future are presented.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether eliminating variation in information presented to multi-disciplinary teams eliminates variation in the proportion accepted for a child protection alert.

The purpose of this paper is to critically reflect on the conditions and context of deinstitutionalization and the process of transformation of the institutions for children with behavioural problems from several key aspects: current offer of treatment programs and interventions in institutions and communities, competences of professionals in transformation process, research related to needs and risks of children and education of future professionals.

Se ha desarrollado la presente herramienta de indicadores a fines de poder contar con un instrumento de medición y evaluación del nivel de progreso alcanzado en cada país respecto de los sistemas nacionales de protección de la niñez.

The 2020 Global Education Monitoring Report recognizes the contexts and challenges facing countries in providing inclusive education; the groups at risk of being excluded from education and the barriers individual learners face, especially when various characteristics intersect; and the fact that exclusion can be physical, social (in interpersonal and group relations), psychological and systemic.

In this brief, John H. Laub and Ron Haskins suggest a number of policies that could help children with incarcerated parents and children in foster care.

In this article, developmental psychologists Ariel Kalil and Rebecca Ryan examine the relation between parenting practices and socioeconomic gaps in child outcomes.

This webinar includes presentations from panelists in Latin America discussing early childhood programming in the region, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To explore the complex dynamics of parental migration on nonsuicidal self‐injury (NSSI), this study examined the roles of parent–child cohesion and socioeconomic status (SES) in the relationship between stressful life events and NSSI.

This review provides an overview and educational material on nonaccidental injury (NAI) and its clinical presentation.

The purpose of this article is to discuss whether adoption, in the form in which it is systematized in Brazil, by the National Adoption Register, may be the solution to the serious problem of child and adolescent in risky situations of care, especially those living in the state of Rio de Janeiro.

The purpose of this study was to identify changes in knowledge, skills and efficacy of foster caregivers who received trauma coach services. 

This report is an analysis of the overall findings from the research project on Haitian child domestic workers.

This report presents a needs assessment which provides a summary of the situation of children with disabilities who are living in residential care institutions and in communities in Cambodia and proposes seven key recommendations and relevant concrete actions for the short, medium and long term to improve the quality of care of children with disabilities living in institutions and to ensure that they have better access to basic services and are living in a protective environment.

In this webinar, hosted by Early Childhood Development Network, UNICEF, and the Khan Foundation, panelists discuss programs to support parents and caregivers during the COVID-19 crisis.

In this policy brief, Joining Forces, as a coalition of six child rights organisations, calls for child protection to be prioritised in the response to COVID-19.

This brief from the Zimbabwe Education Cluster presents details on the humanitarian needs and response in Zimbabwe due to the COVID-19 crisis, including the acute needs of orphans and vulnerable children, children with disabilities, and others.

This documentary tells the stories of four Aboriginal grandmothers in Australia whose grandchildren have been removed and placed in state care, and who are fighting to have their grandchildren placed in their care.

This accompanying annex document to the Inter-agency Technical Note on the Protection of Children during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Children and Alternative Care provides helpful tips to promote the engagement and participation of all stakeholders, which is central to maintaining continuity of services for children.

The Global status report on preventing violence against children 2020 charts countries’ progress towards the SDGs aimed at ending violence against children.

This video from Rise Magazine features tips from parents who have had their children placed in foster care in the U.S. to other parents in the same situation on how to handle visits with their children in the care system.

This video from Rise Magazine is designed to include in training for caseworkers, visit coaches, parent advocates and other frontline staff who will supervise or support parents during visits with children in foster care.

In this video, State Representative Rena Moran and State Senator Jeff Hayden of the U.S. state of Minnesota introduce legislation that would establish guidelines to prevent the removal of African American children from their families.

This editorial piece from The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health urges that the "far-reaching consequences [of the COVID-19 crisis] call for children and their right to health, education, and protection to be prioritised in the pandemic response and recovery planning."

In this Submission to the Inquiry into Support for Children of Imprisoned Parents, Karleen Gribble, Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Western Sydney University, comments on "the situation of infants and young children whose mothers are incarcerated and the support or undermining of their health and wellbeing in the justice system."

In this comment piece that accompanies Child-to-adult neurodevelopmental and mental health trajectories after early life deprivation: the young adult follow-up of the longitudinal English and Romanian Adoptees study, Frank C Verhulst discusses how that study "fills an important knowledge gap on the long-term mental health consequences of early severe childhood deprivation."

The aim of this study has been to assess the reasons for the increased enrolment of children into orphanages and child care centres. An action research was conducted in Islamabad and Rawalpindi between November and December 2017 to assess the situation and identify the causes and circumstance that bring in and compel orphans and vulnerable children to move out after a certain age or grade.

This collection of guidance from the UK Department for Education lays out what local authority children’s services need to do during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.

This integrative literature review studies well‐being of unaccompanied asylum‐seeking children through the three modes of recognition—love, rights and solidarity—as conceptualized by Axel Honneth.

Because social networks have been shown to impact behavioral health outcomes, this study sought to better understand the network characteristics of homeless young adults with a history of foster care.

The goal of this study is to identify predicative indicators that will assist in the development of a home study that will increase consistency within home studies and decrease timeliness of completion.

In this webinar, a panel including persons with disabilities and experts in disaster management, human rights and service provision discuss the need for “emergency deinstitutionalisation” of persons with disabilities and how this could be achieved.

This dashboard from Girls Not Brides provides data on child marriage around the globe, including child marriage prevalence, country and regional data, legal age of marriage per country, and more.

The aim of this report was to collate information about policies and plans, changes over time, strengths and areas of concerns relevant to advancement in deinstitutionalisation in 27 EU countries and for six target groups: adults with disabilities, adults with mental health problems, children (including children with disabilities), unaccompanied or separated migrant children, homeless persons and older adults.

In the present study, six unaccompanied asylum‐seeking minors (UASMs) were interviewed and interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used as a methodology to analyse the data.

A mixed method correlational exploratory pilot was conducted in Washington State to determine items within the home study assessment that could be used as indicators to identify baseline requirements of the assessment and suggest anticipated depth (expansion or reduction) within the required topic(s).

Based on 39 semi-directed individual interviews with social workers from child welfare services, the current study aims at highlighting how social workers come to the decision to remove a child from parental care, and how they choose a foster family.

In this episode of the Protected! Podcast, Hani Mansourian from the Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action talks to Selim Benaissa, Chief Technical Officer from the ILO on the Myanmar program for the elimination of child labour about how the coronavirus pandemic has affected the program.

In this episode of the Protected! Podcast, Elsa Laurin, the Senior Child Protection Officer for the East and Horn of Africa from UNHCR, tells Hani Mansourian how they and their partner organisations re-prioritised child protection cases in response to the changing situation of shut borders in eastern Africa as the threat of an outbreak of COVID-19 loomed.

This thesis aimed to explore health, abuse, support, and preconditions for school among children in out-of-home care (OHC) in Sweden and to assess changes after an intervention targeting foster children’s school performance.

In this second part of the Lancet Group Commission on institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation of children, international experts in reforming care for children identify evidence-based policy recommendations to promote family-based alternatives to institutionalisation.

This paper reviews the literature on child institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation from a global perspective. This review included a survey of historical and cultural trends and estimates of current numbers of children in institutional care, a systematic review and meta­-analysis of developmental sequelae, and a largely qualitative review of factors found to predict individual variations in such outcomes.

In this commentary piece, Aisha K Yousafzai - of the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and the  and Department of Paediatrics and Child Health at Aga Khan University - notes that "the evidence presented [in the Lancet Group Commission on the institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation of children] and their call to action to ensure abandoned children can thrive in family-based care environments rather than in institutions matters now more than ever as the global community addresses unprecedented challenges to ensure a generation of children are not left behind with respect to their survival, health, development, learning, and safety."

In this commentary piece, Anne Longfield, Children’s Commissioner for England, explores the use of children's care homes in England and the need for improved supports to prevent placement in children's home and to provide for the needs of children and young people who are placed in these homes.

In this commentary piece for The Lancet Psychiatry, Joan Kaufman highlights some key findings and recommendations from the Lancet Group Commission on the institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation of children.

This Executive Summary provides an overview of the Lancet Group Commission, which advocates global reform of the care of separated children through the progressive replacement of institutional provision with safe and nurturing family-based care.

This Lancet Group Commission, published between The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health and The Lancet Psychiatry, advocates global reform of the care of separated children through the progressive replacement of institutional provision with safe and nurturing family-based care.

This guidance is designed to inform child protection actors in Kenya in light of the COVID-19 crisis. It guides actions targeting, and services provided for, vulnerable children and families, including children living in institutions, children living on the streets, children with disabilities, and others.

The aim of this Technical Note is to support child protection practitioners and government officials in their immediate response to the child protection concerns faced by children who are at risk of separation or in alternative care during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This dashboard draws on periodic country office reporting against an evolving questionnaire, first initiated on 12 March 2020, representing important early indications of the impacts of COVID-19 on the disruption of essential services for children and families.

This webpage from UNICEF links to the Policy Brief on the Impact of COVID-19 on children, the Dashboard on Data to inform the COVID-19 response, and other key data resources on COVID-19 and its impacts on children.

This dashboard contains the latest data from UNICEF’s global databases that are relevant to the COVID-19 response for children. Explore country-level data by gender, residence and wealth quintile.

This Joint Statement the ASEAN Ministers responsible for social welfare and development outlines their concerns and commitments to action regarding meeting the needs of vulnerable people impacted by the COVID-19 crisis, including children with disabilities, children deprived of liberty, and children in institutional care, among other groups.

This webinar focused on Early Childhood Development in Humanitarian Settings in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article from UNICEF describes the increased risks and vulnerabilities faced by children left behind by migration in Kyrgyzstan due to the COVID-19 crisis, and how UNICEF and its partners are responding to meet their needs.

This synthesis is the first in a series of digests of COVID-19 related resources (guidance, news, & academic articles) from the Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action. It focuses on sexual and gender-based violence and COVID-19.

The purpose of this checklist from the European Expert Group on the transition from institutional to community-based care, with Hope and Homes for Children, is to ensure EU funds in the 2021-2027 programming period contribute to independent living and inclusion in the community, including by supporting desk officers to check the consistency of the measures to transition from institutional to family-based and community-based services for children and the prevention of institutionalisation and separation of children, including with disabilities, from their families.

This paper from Just for Kids Law (JfKL) explores an issue that the organization has come across through their work: cases of under 18s (mainly 16- and 17-year olds) in the UK who are facing homelessness and do not receive the support they are entitled to from local authority children’s services. 

In this paper, after a historical introduction, the authors will refer, from a general point of view, to the current moment of immigration witnessed in Spain offering not only statistical data regarding this phenomenon but also legislation, and description of the policies carried out by the central and regional governments on issues like immigration, asylum and integration, with a particular focus on unaccompanied minors.

For this study, in-depth interviews with 17 currently or recently-involved parents in a Midwestern U.S. family treatment court, which are specialized child welfare dockets designed to address substance use, were conducted and analyzed using constant comparative coding, in order to understand parents’ perspectives on their own substance use, including its impact on their parenting, before and during child welfare system involvement.

Relational permanence – a form of social support characterized by the presence of an ongoing caring and supportive person in the context of the foster care system – is the primary type of social relationship that is explored in this article. Regression analyses were conducted examining whether relational permanence predicted later delinquency.

Through the lens of institutional ethnography, this paper explores how experiences of education inside one Secure Children’s Home in England are shaped by the institution.

The purpose of this study was to examine the mental health status and substance use behaviors of urban left-behind children and urban children still living with their parents in comparison to rural left-behind children.

This study explores a particularly wide discretionary space set for decision-making within the Norwegian welfare bureaucracy; care order decisions concerning newborns directly removed from the hospital by the child protection system.

This article describes the first United States-based national study to compare the rates of substantiation of maltreatment among cases reported to child protective services involving caregivers with and without disabilities.

This paper provides a structured overview of the existing parenting literature with the aim of developing an evidence-based and culture-sensitive framework of parenting and its influence on child development.

Drawing on the narratives offered by child and family social workers, this paper considers a series of possible explanations for Northern Ireland (NI)'s significantly lower out of home care rates.

This article is a qualitative phenomenological study seeking to examine the perceptions, views and feelings of the orphans and vulnerable children (OVC), care-givers and community leaders on their experiences with Basic Education Assistance Module (BEAM) as a material and psychosocial support intervention in Zimbabwe.

This paper chronicles the goals of the partnership and the planning and implementation of the Child Protection Training Academy, developed by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and the University of Illinois Springfield in the U.S.

This research project aimed to study and inform the effective use of Pupil Premium Plus (PP+)-funded interventions to support educational outcomes for looked after children in the UK.

The aim of the present study was to provide understanding into the past and present experiences of individuals who had resided in a child-care institution during their childhood and/or adolescence and to contribute to the study of the long-term impact of institutional care on adult life.

This article describes a policy adoption case study about deinstitutionalization of childcare in Georgia since independence. It highlights the evolving and non-homogeneous nature of transnational agency in the area of childcare deinstitutionalization, and offers insights into the complex relationship between transnational agency and national policymaking.

This paper explores the efficacy of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Convention, UN General Assembly, 1989) through the lens of the over-representation of First Nations children placed in out-of-home care in Canada and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in Australia.

This document provides interim guidance for child protection and health actors in the context of quarantine and isolation measures to mitigate related child protection risks, minimize family separation,and promote family unity and social cohesion.

This study selected children who remained in kinship care (N = 267) for three waves from nationally representative data and examined the longitudinal associations among poverty, economic pressure, financial assistance, and children’s behavioral health outcomes in kinship care.

This study uses secondary data analysis of the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect 2008 to explore what case and worker factors predict the provision of ongoing child welfare services.

This Policy Brief by the United Nations highlights the impact of COVID-19 on persons with disabilities and in doing so, outlines key actions and recommendations to make the response and recovery inclusive of persons with disabilities.

This Policy Brief offers four basic tenets to guide our collective response to human mobility and the COVID-19 crisis, including the response to children on the move and children who are separated or unaccompanied in particular.

Each “case study” chapter in this book provides a rich description of the development, current status, and future of residential care in countries from Brazil to Botswana.

The aim of this study was to explore the experiences of residential care from the perspectives of a group of young people who had lived in residential childcare institutions in Bangladesh with a view to making improvements in residential childcare in the future.

In the context of COVID-19, this manual focuses on psychosocial care of children and prevention of violence in spaces where children stay (child care institutions, families, temporary isolation facilities, NGO shelters, etc.)