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. 

This factsheet provides child welfare professionals with an overview of motivational interviewing, describes circumstances when it could be applied, and highlights the basics of the method.

This publication from the Child Welfare Information Gateway presents an overview of US state laws that designate the officials and entities that may have access to the confidential records of child abuse and neglect reports and investigations, the circumstances under which information may be disclosed, and the appropriate use of confidential information. 

This study evaluates the ‘Nurturing Attachment’ program in the UK, a Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy intervention for adoptive families.

This research digest is the 8th in the series on adolescence. This edition focuses on protection from violence, health and development & learning. 

This resource from Opening Doors for Europe's Children features an interactive map of Europe which offers a brief description of children's care reforms in highlighted countries.  

The main objective of this Joint Rapid Education and Child Protection Need Assessment (JRNA) was to identify education and child protection needs, priorities and capacities of Rohingya boys and girls in the camps, settlements and host community in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh to inform and provide the evidence-base for the 2018 Joint Response Plan (JRP). 

This country care review includes the care-related Concluding Observations adopted by the Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

This country care review includes the care-related Concluding Observations adopted by the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

This study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the neural correlates of facial emotion processing in 12-year-old children who took part in a randomized controlled trial of foster care as an intervention for early institutionalization. 

Bridging Two Worlds provides teachers, school administrators and counsellors in Canada with the knowledge and practical resources to deliver more informed and culturally responsive career development and guidance to newcomer and refugee youth from Kindergarten to Grade 12. 

This study examined facial emotion recognition in 12-year-olds in a longitudinally followed sample of children with and without exposure to early life psychosocial deprivation (institutional care).

In this essay from South African Child Gauge 2017, the authors seek to respond to the following questions: Why are caring relationships important for children’s development? What do we know about systems of care for children in South Africa? What are the factors that can compromise care? What are the interventions that can improve the quality of caring relationships?

The objectives of this study are to: use the methodology of a 2007 study to establish foster care minimum adequate rates for children (MARC) based on the child's age and geographical location in every state; update the MARC with cost of living adjustments to 2016; examine changes in gaps between the MARC and the current foster care rates; and identify states that have made increases to their reimbursement rates, relative to the MARC over time. 

This study draws on linked administrative data to describe the exposure of children aged less than 2 years to maternal imprisonment in Western Australia, their contact with child protection services, and infant mortality rates.

This study explores the childhood experiences and transitions to adulthood of 39 Romanian care leavers and adoptees, born around 1989 - 1990.