This study explored how employed caregivers experience the interface between child care, parental control and child rights in the context of Children’s Homes in Ghana.

This report from the University of Bristol School for Poicy Studies and Coram Voice presents findings from a 2017 survey, in which 2,263 looked after children and young people from 16 local authorities in the United Kingdom completed the ‘Your Life, Your Care’ survey to determine their subjective, self-reported wellbeing. 

This report from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center of the United States highlights the connections between US immigration policy and the child welfare system, particularly the criminalization of undocumented immigrants and its impact on foster care in the US.

The objective of this study was to determine if the Power Through Choices (PTC) intervention can increase the use of birth control and reduce pregnancy among system-involved youths living in group care homes.

This Australian study was designed to investigate the factors that contributed to the education of academically successful ex-care women with the intention that the findings might inform current practice to promote the educational achievement of children in care contexts. 

This volume of the Scottish Journal of Residential Child Care includes a collections of articles, reflections and reviews covering a wide range of subjects from taking a fresh look at leaving care interactions, to exploring the role of storytelling in social care practice.

This paper aims to understand the functioning of institution in protecting the rights of children who are in need of care and protection and highlight measures for revamping the institutional care and revolutionizing family care.

This paper explores the current literature around foster care training in the UK in relation to a short training programme devised for foster carers from a small Scottish charity supporting looked after children in Scotland.

This article provides a summary of the current context for residential child care in England. It records continually increasing outcomes as evidenced in a new set of Quality Standards by a new inspection framework.

Due to the high instances of young people in care becoming homeless after leaving care, this study explored how an intervention could be co-designed to support young people and leaving care workers (LCWs) to share and elicit views about where a young person could live when they leave care.

The present study analyzes the risk factors responsible for the exposure of migrant and refugee children to physical, psychological, and sexual violence and exploitation in Greece in the context of the ongoing migrant humanitarian crisis. 

This paper from Best Start (a global campaign for Early Childhood Development led by children’s charity Theirworld) emphasizes the need for holistic early childhood development (ECD) programs - Safe Spaces - for young children in emergency situations. 

This document from the Initiative for Child Rights in the Global Compacts lays out recommended actionable commitments for the Global Compact on Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.

The report investigates why children are placed into alternative care, what types of alternative care are available in Nepal, what structures and processes govern alternative care, how the alternative care workforce are trained and supported, and what is and is not working in Nepal's current system. It concludes with recommendations for enhancing alternative care in the country.

This issue brief highlights the importance of understanding the concerns and needs of children and families in rural communities in the United States

This study aimed to assess both the prevalence of stress and the coping mechanisms as well as identify the predictors of stress levels among adolescents in Malaysian orphanages.

The article aims to show the process of deinstitutionalisation in Bulgaria. 

This text describes “promising practice” mobile services for children and parents suffering abuse, neglect poverty and disability in Bulgaria. 

This paper evaluates a program started by International Social Service for social and professional realisation of young people leaving care (Care Leavers Integration Programme, CLIP), ten years after the program began.

The objective of this study was to investigate whether men and women who were looked-after (in public care) or adopted as children are at increased risk of adverse psychological and social outcomes in adulthood.

This study implemented a systematic review process to identify the personal characteristics, skills and abilities of successful resource families that maximize foster and adoptive parent retention and maximize placement permanency of teens placed in out of home care.

This study addresses three key research questions: (1) How do older youth in foster care define their personal permanency goals? (2) How much progress have these youth made in achieving their personal permanency goals and other aspects of relational permanency, and how does this vary by gender, race, and age? and (3) What transition-related outcomes are associated with relational permanency achievement? 

This study uses nationally representative data collected in 2011–2012 in Moldova (N = 1601) and Georgia (N = 1193) to investigate how children’s health associates with five transnational characteristics: migrant and return-migrant household types, parental migration and parental divorce, maternal and/or paternal migration and caregiver’s identity, the duration of migration, and remittances.

This report from Save the Children identifies concerning trends for the safety and wellbeing of children living in areas impacted by conflict, through analysis of the United Nations Annual Reports of the Secretary General on Children and Armed Conflict (CAAC) and new research by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).

In this mixed methods study, the authors use nationally representative panel data to investigate migration patterns when viewed from the perspective of children. 

Through this study, data were collected through interviews with 23 care leavers in Ghana to examine their challenges and the factors that influence their coping mechanisms.

This study examined the effects of placement and school stability on students' academic growth before, during, and after out-of-home placements.

On the basis of qualitative interviews with 10 children about their experiences collaborating with child welfare professionals, this study has identified ways in which professionals can facilitate children's participation.

This study sought to investigate the lived experiences of care leavers from institutional care facility in Botswana.

The 2017 country factsheets provide an update on the status of child protection and care reforms from 16 European countries that are the focus of Opening Doors for Europe’s Children campaign in Phase II. 

This in depth qualitative study of 10 youth who completed the My Life intervention focused on investigating coaching and mentoring elements and processes that youth participants identify as most important to their success, with the intention of informing the further development of youth-directed approaches to supporting young people who are transitioning to adulthood. 

This qualitative study explores the unique views about the family system held by adolescents who have spent years in foster care in Israel. 

This report is the result of an investigation into the amount of official development assistance (ODA) that is targeted at ending violence against children, either as the main focus or as part of a broader programme. 

The global plan of action is a technical document informed by evidence, best practices and existing WHO technical guidance.

This fact sheet on violence against children from the World Health Organization (WHO) provides a brief overview of violence against children around the world.

The objective of this study was to assess malnutrition and psychosocial dysfunction among vulnerable children as well as to determine the association between malnutrition and psychosocial dysfunction among orphan and vulnerable children in Kaski district, Nepal. 

This paper focuses on understanding how the key stakeholders of the foster care system work together, as well as the systems that facilitate collaboration.

The current study makes analyses of the national strategy for deinstitutionalization of children and concludes on important recommendations concerning national policy development. 

This paper analyses the experiences of adolescents in foster care placement with specific reference to participatory decision making in an indigenous African cultural context in South Africa. 

This study used a mixed-methods multiphase, iterative process to illuminate the congruencies and incongruencies between the young adults' accounts of their foster care experiences and the legalistic, system-focused view of their experiences. 

By drawing on an empirical study on placing disabled children for adoption, the article seeks to demonstrate the practical application of critical realist by combining its Retroductive framework with Grounded Theory methods. 

This data brief presents data highlights that compare the outcomes reported by youth in the second NYTD cohort at ages 17 and 19.

This report provides preliminary estimates of U.S. Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) data for Fiscal Year 2015.

This study contributes to current research on the behavior problems of children in foster care by analyzing a more comprehensive set of concurrent child history and contextual predictors. 

This review aims to systematically review methodological challenges and limitations of interventions designed to help carers meet the needs of children in alternative care, to provide an analysis of the current state of the evidence base for these interventions.

To increase knowledge of foster children’s needs and how these are conceptualized, this paper presents a systematic literature review. 

This article compares blank care order application templates used in four countries (England, Finland, Norway, and USA (California)), treating them as a vital part of the ‘institutional scripts’ that shape practice, and embody state principles of child protection. 

The article explores the inclusion of unaccompanied migrant children reaching Italy without their parents or a legal guardian.

The aim of this special issue of the International Journal of Longitudinal and Life Course Studies is to examine the outcomes of children who were raised for part of their childhood in out-of-home care, including in foster care and institutions. 

This study examines adult outcomes of youths (N=251) who spent time in a Dutch judicial treatment institution.

This paper discusses the results of a qualitative study on adult care leavers in Flanders (Belgium).

This paper examines the post-compulsory educational pathways of young people who have spent some or all of their childhoods in local authority.

This brief article will outline the path to the provision of an explicit entitlement to aftercare in Ireland.

The aim of this study was to examine the outcomes of out-of-home placement in adolescence.

This paper examines how types and sources of social support vary by youths’ foster care placement and foster care status at age 19.

This article explores whether the number of visits by birth parents influence perceptions of attachment, children’s competence and mental health, and stress levels in foster parents.

Concern about the effectiveness of Serious Case Reviews for generating improvements in child protection in England led to proposals in the Wood review to replace the current system with rapid local learning inquiries and a national system of learning from significant incidents. This article challenges both the analysis in the Wood review and the proposals themselves. 

A First Nations child welfare organization has prioritized further understanding of reunification and parenting, including identification of successes and barriers to reunification, and service needs within communities. These priorities were addressed with a community-based participatory research model and guided by a Research Advisory. 

This article reports on a systematic review of research on residential care-leaving in South Africa, from 2003 to 2016. 

This report from the Child Protection Area of Responsibility (CP AoR) highlights the child protection needs and responses in Syria and includes objectives and targets for continued child protection interventions and strategies.

This briefing paper, which is the third in a series, provides a brief overview of the characteristics of the children growing up with relatives in Scotland.

This briefing paper is the first in a series, from an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded research study. The study explores the prevalence and characteristics of children growing up in kinship care in the UK using 2011 Census microdata.

This study examines and compares the extent of child maltreatment (physical, emotional, and sexual abuse; physical and emotional neglect) and lifetime traumatization with regard to current adult mental health in a group of survivors of institutional abuse and a comparison group from the community. 

The South African Child Gauge® is published annually by the Children’s Institute, University of Cape Town, to monitor progress towards realising children’s rights. This issue focuses on children and the Sustainable Development Goals. 

This article, based on a unique mixed‐methods study of social work interventions in the UK and the influence of poverty, highlights a narrative from practitioners that argues that, as many poor families do not harm their children, it is stigmatizing to discuss a link between poverty and child abuse and neglect.

This 5-minute video from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University explores the development and use of core capabilities — known as executive function and self-regulation skills — from early childhood into adolescence and adulthood.

This policy brief provides the most current estimates of the number and characteristics of the children growing up with relatives in the UK, which were established through analyses of secure microdata from the 2011 Census, highlighting analysis and policy implications of those findings.

This joint report by the Refugee Council and Oxfam is one of the first to look at how family reunion and ongoing forced separation from loved ones affect the ability of refugees to successfully integrate into UK society. 

This report is based on a survey of members of the Grandparents Plus Kinship Care Support Network, which includes almost 4,000 kinship carers in the UK.

Informed by a cultural psychological approach to development, the authors analysed interviews with 18 unaccompanied Afghan boys and their professional caregivers.

The first online consultation on the Nurturing Care Framework for early childhood development was held between 24th January and 6th February, a summary of the responses submitted will be available in March.

The article aims to uncover what hinders social workers to carry out effective work in providing social services for families whose children are in temporary custody.

The focus of this paper will be the intersection of law, policy implementation, and social work in child protection, specifically child protection involving children who are separated by an international border from their families.

This study explored whether the strength of caseworkers' engagement with families in the child-welfare system was associated with the caseworkers' academic degrees, job responsibilities and environments, and/or ethnicity.

This study uses a large administrative dataset, the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS), to explore how public child welfare agencies in the United States use parental disability in their data collection efforts through examining the use of parental disability as a removal reason. 

This study examined two research questions: (1) how do foster care alumni remember their experiences of placement moves in foster care, and (2) how do foster care alumni perceive the consequences of their foster care placement moves on their lives today?

This article explores the perspectives and programme needs of transition service providers (institutions and the government) in preparing and supporting adolescent girls leaving institutional care in Harare, Zimbabwe.

The aim of the current study was to examine whether contact with CPS is associated with improved mental health outcomes among adult respondents who reported experiencing child abuse, after adjusting for sociodemographic factors and abuse severity. 

This paper presents a community based participatory research project, which adopted a photovoice approach with seven unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) living in foster care in the United Kingdom.

The Bucharest Early Intervention Project sought to examine the effects of foster care as an alternative to institutional care for abandoned infants in Romanian institutions.

From ethnographic research with unaccompanied children in the United States and Guatemala, this paper explores emergent and, at times, conflicting narratives of care that young migrants encounter while in U.S. federal custody. 

This study examined the relationship “Class-Based Visibility Bias” (CBVB) using statewide individual-level data in four states (Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, and New Hampshire) and nationwide county-level data.

This article examines whether migrant children are viewed differently than native children, employing an experiment on a representative sample of the populations of Austria, Norway and Spain.

To help promote the use of administrative data to inform child welfare programming, this paper provides an overview and demonstration of a Feedback Improvement System with web-based visualization technology to illustrate child- and agency-level child welfare data from the state of Utah.

This study uses data from the recent Modern Adoptive Families survey to understand parent perspectives on their preparation for adoption. 

This analysis drew from a study in which child welfare professionals were interviewed about their definitions of “well-being” and the barriers and facilitators to promoting well-being in their daily practices. 

This paper describes results from focus groups conducted with child welfare providers, educational personnel, and youth with histories of running away from foster care placements.

In this review, the authors briefly outline who is most at risk for experiencing parental incarceration, before providing an overview of recent multidisciplinary research on the impacts of parental incarceration for American children, ages 0–17. 

In the current study the authors examined associations between children's pre-adoption experiences (type of pre-adoption care and early deprivation) and their adaptive and maladaptive behavioral adjustment. 

This policy essay from the Journal of Family Strengths explores the overrepresentation of LGBTQ youth in the US child welfare system and how to foster greater acceptance, inclusion, and trauma-informed care for these children. 

Working collaboratively with two state associations and their member (nonprofit) agencies providing out-of-home care to children and youth, University researchers conducted a multi-site project to examine whether there were any differences in individual child-level outcomes between children placed in residential group care and those placed in foster. 

This study examined factors associated with extracurricular participation and whether participation in extracurricular activities is associated with completing high school and attending college among a sample of older youth transitioning from foster care.

The aim of this study was to assess the impact of ‘Parenting for Lifelong Health: Sinovuyo Teen’, a parenting programme for adolescents in low-income and middle-income countries, on abuse and parenting practices. 

This study emphasises different facets of peer exploitation awareness and experience identified in closed-type institutions, including a couple of abusive behaviours that have not been previously identified in long-term residential centres.

This bulletin for professionals in the child welfare field explores how caseworkers can identify and support children who are victims of human trafficking as well as children who are at greater risk for future victimization.

This podcast episode features the Miami CARES project. Funded through a Children's Bureau grant, the Miami CARES project brings more than 10 government and community agencies within Miami-Dade (FL) County together to forge a collaborative, systemic approach to identifying minors who are, or are at risk of becoming, victims of human trafficking.

Children with disabilities are at least three times more likely to be abused or neglected than their peers without disabilities, and they are more likely to be seriously injured or harmed by maltreatment. This bulletin describes the scope of the problem, risk factors, and strategies for prevention.