Several youth facilities have devoted considerable resources to improving the quality of practice and the interest in understanding the safety needs of youth in residential care has grown. However, there is limited research that considers how youth in residential facilities themselves define and experience safety, what their safety concerns are, and how they would like systems and staff to respond to their needs. Therefore, this current study investigated youth perceptions of safety in residential facilities in Norway and their experiences of and reaction to staff behaviors and attitudes.

A large proportion of children in the foster care system experience placement instability, which works against the three national goals for children in the child welfare system: permanency, safety, and well-being. Placement instability has been linked with increased child externalizing behaviors and increased parenting stress. Child-Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT) is one intervention which combats issues associated with placement instability. The authors outline the needs of children and families in the foster care system, the benefits of relationship-focused play therapy interventions, and provide rationale for the use of CPRT among child welfare agencies.

This paper found that there was marked overrepresentation of First Nations children in the child welfare system in Ontario, Canada. These children were three times as likely to be investigated as white children and more likely to be placed when controlling for investigation concerns. The paper concluded that recent policy changes have not brought change to this overrepresentation.

Children in care face adverse health outcomes throughout their life course compared with their peers. In England, over the past decade, the stark rise in the number of cared-for children has coincided with rising child poverty, a key risk factor for children entering care. The authors aimed to assess the contribution of recent trends in child poverty to trends in care entry.

Next Steps for Our Kids (Next Steps) sets out an ambitious reform agenda building on the positive outcomes seen through the implementation of the previous A Step Up for Our Kids Strategy (A Step Up) and addresses the continuing challenges seen in the child and youth protection system in Australia. Next Steps is an evolution of A Step Up and will see various original elements matured, extended and expanded.

This Insight draws on research and policy, as well as practice experience to explore friendship, why it matters and how it can be better supported. It looks critically at the nature of friendship and the impact that aspects of the ‘care system’ can have on children and young people making and maintaining friends. It highlights how significant friendships can be for children and young people who are ‘looked after’ in the UK.

Concurrent planning is a process by which all options for permanency are considered simultaneously for children in foster care. Children are placed with caregivers (resource parents) who are open to adoption if reunification with birth parents does not occur. This U.S.-based quantitative study explored resource parents’ perceptions of the concurrent planning process via surveys at two time points. Participants included resource parents of 77 infants assessed at 2 months and 1 year after placement.

This study investigates how experiences and practices of transnational care arrangements are negotiated from the perspective of the nonparental carers. It specifically aims to understand its dynamics and patterns in shaping care relationships, normative familial values and the hope to reconstitute the family amidst migration-induced care.

This report follows the route of asylum seekers arriving in Tapachula. It draws on a March 2022 visit during which the researchers conducted field documentation and interviews with asylum seekers, government officials, UN agencies, and civil society organizations providing services to migrants. The report highlights abuses, arbitrary treatment, and steep obstacles faced by asylum seekers at each step of their process.

This report aims to increase awareness of the scale and severity of the economic crisis in Lebanon over the past three years. It describes how the crisis disproportionately affects children and is likely to have short-and long-term consequences on their future.

The aim of this publication is to highlight the protective aspects related to the child’s identity rights, with a focus on the family relations element, as embedded in international, regional and national standards. The publication provides direction on how to build identity safeguards, drawing on past lessons and capitalising on current opportunities. To do this, the right to identity is explored through a range of examples of existing challenges, promising practices and testimonies.

This advocacy guide provides ideas and tools for making a case in favour of the inclusion of SBC approaches in the portfolio of solutions embraced by local and national governments, donors and other stake-holders. It includes both a foundational framework as well as worksheets that can be used to elaborate and contextualize advocacy messages intended for delivery to key stakeholders. This guide can be used in concert with the INSPIRE Indicator Guidance and Results Framework and the INSPIRE Handbook.

This U.S. based study systematically summarizes the effectiveness of peer parent programs in child welfare on case outcomes, specifically permanency, time-in-care, and re-entry post reunification.

This paper presents a case study that discusses the lived experiences of two LGBTQA + young people who have been in out-of-home care in Australia, focusing particularly on the influence of relationships on their developing sexual identity.

El estudio de caso, plasmado en una página, está dirigido a posibles donantes, público interesado y actores vinculados a la reforma del cuidado infantil, que desean aprender sobre los procedimientos relacionados con el primer caso exitoso de reunificación familiar a cargo de la Iniciativa Cambiando la Forma en que Cuidamos que opera en Guatemala y además sobre el importante papel de la gestión de casos. El presente estudio de caso fue escrito en julio del 2020, un año después de la reunificación.

This toolkit was developed with and for philanthropic funders who want to better understand how to support child and youth participation. It builds on an ECFG study published in 2021, Shifting the Field: Philanthropy’s Role in Strengthening Child- and Youth-Led Community Rooted Groups, which maps current practices in philanthropic support for child- and youth-led work at the community level and provides strategic advice to donors on how to strengthen their funding modalities through participatory approaches.

This webinar was co-hosted with the Changing the Way We Care (CTWWC) initiative and was an opportunity to lift up how the Catholic Church is advancing safe and nurturing family care for children around the world.

In this workshop Family for Every Child members Flüchtlingsrat Niedersachsen (The Refugee Council of Lower Saxony, Germany), Programma Integra (Italy) and METAdrasi (Greece) share their experience around supporting unaccompanied minors, with For Our Children (FoC) in Bulgaria. They share top tips with FoC as they navigate the arrival of unaccompanied minors fleeing the conflict in Ukraine, and find ways to support them.

The webinar, hosted by Transform Alliance Africa, provides an overview of the progress and findings from our youth wellbeing project. The youth wellbeing project is a community mental health initiative led by care experienced youth that aims to develop a safe transition pathway for young people leaving orphanages and provide support to young people experiencing well being and mental health challenges in the community.

This sixteenth issue of the South African Child Gauge focuses attention on child and adolescent mental health and how early experiences of adversity ripple out across the life course and generations at great cost to individuals and society. It calls on South African society to put children at the centre of all policies in order to protect children from harm, build their capacity to cope with stress and adversity, and provide them with opportunities to thrive.

Eurochild has carried out an urgent mapping, with support from its members, UNICEF country teams and government representatives across 13 countries. The mapping examines the laws and policies at national level for children in alternative care and unaccompanied and separated children from Ukraine who arrive in the following countries: Czechia, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain and the United Kingdom.

This discussion paper addresses issues facing unaccompanied and separated children fleeing Ukraine and arriving in the European Union (EU). In particular, it focuses on the priority issue of how care and custodial arrangements and guardianship under child protection and migration measures are established within EU Member States. This question has implications for how children access protection, how information on their circumstances is managed and ultimately how durable solutions are identified and secured for children.

Această formare rapidă a fost concepută pentru a oferi informații familiilor de plasament (foster care) din Moldova în vederea pregătirii pentru plasamentul copiilor neînsoțiți și separați din Ucraina. Pachetul de formare include un PPT și un ghid al facilitatorului. Conținutul oferit în timpul programului de formare de șase ore include informații de bază despre traumele din copilărie, experiențele adverse din copilărie, elementele-cheie ale PFA, inclusiv "Privește, Ascultă și Leagă”, precum și înțelegerea modului în care se pot identifica și sprijini atât copiii care au trecut prin traume, cât și modul în care acestea se pot manifesta la diferite vârste și etape de dezvoltare.

Childrearing in sub-Saharan Africa is often viewed as collaborative, where children benefit from support from kin. For single mothers living in informal settlements, kin networks may be highly dispersed and offer little day-to-day childrearing support, but may provide opportunities for child fostering. This study conducted in Nairobi, Kenya, uses a linked lives approach, where single mothers’ connections with kin and romantic partners may influence whether – and what type of – kin are relied on to support child fostering.

The purpose of this study was to examine, in a sample of residential care children, the moderating role of cognitive flexibility in the association between maltreatment and emotion regulation competencies. The sample included 69 children aged 8 to 12 and their group home educator as their primary caretaker. Educators completed questionnaires evaluating child emotion regulation competencies and cognitive flexibility.

This study provides an overview of the family reunification process of Latinx adolescents who have migrated to join their families in the United States.

This article presents Kaupapa Māori research undertaken by a mokopuna Māori with the lived experience of state care in New Zealand, alongside established Kaupapa Māori researchers. Literature containing the voices of care-experienced mokopuna Māori was reviewed to explore what conditions exist and are needed to uphold wellbeing.

Previous studies have shown that mental health disorders (MHD) among parents might be an important mechanism in the intergenerational transmission of out-of-home care (OHC). The current study aimed to further study this interplay by investigating the associations between OHC and MHD within and across generations in a Swedish cohort.

This report aims to provide a rapid assessment of the risks of trafficking and exploitation created by the war in Ukraine and the gaps in the current anti-trafficking response, in order to identify what needs to be done now to reduce and prevent trafficking before it is too late. This rapid assessment is based on desktop research; interviews/discussions with organisations, experts and participants in the anti-trafficking response including volunteers, translators, refugees, and displaced people; and a field visit to Poland.

This article discussed the proceedings for placement of children in foster care by foreign authorities introduced into Polish law. The available official data indicate that the British and German authorities are the most inclined to place children with Polish citizenship in foster care in their homeland.

Black and Latinx youth are more likely to be placed into foster care compared to non-Latinx white youth. Foster care placement can facilitate mental health service use, yet youth from marginalized and oppressed racial and ethnic groups in foster care are still less likely to receive mental health services compared to non-Latinx white youth. This study aims to examine this discrepancy Black and Latinx youth face by testing (a) whether mental health need moderates the relationship between race or ethnicity and foster care placement and (b) whether race or ethnicity moderates the relationship between foster care placement and mental health service use.

Separation and loss characterise a child’s experience in care, yet losses in the care-experienced population have rarely been studied as a possible source of trauma or as events that may justify a grief response. A literature search of five databases yielded 592 publications. 41 full text articles were reviewed, 16 publications were included. Thematic analysis revealed: children in care are affected by two broad type of ambiguous loss, relationship losses and psychosocial losses; behaviours labelled as ‘problem’ behaviours may in fact be indicators of the manifestations of ambiguous loss and disenfranchised grief; manifold ambiguous losses associated with multiple placement moves has a cumulative effect that can generate long-term negative consequences; the effects of ambiguous loss can be offset by supporting children in care to understand that their losses may not be resolvable, to build tolerance to this ambiguity, to rebuild their identity through forging permanent connections, and to make meaning of their situations.

This study focused on Israeli care leavers a decade after leaving care and explored various factors associated with satisfaction with both intimate relationships and parenthood.

Individual studies suggest most children and youth in residential care centres (RCCs) have living parents, and parental death is not the primary antecedent to placement in residential care. The goal of the present review was to examine the literature to better understand the primary antecedents to placement in RCCs overall. One hundred thirty-two studies, including 60,683 children in 47 nations meet eligibility criteria for inclusion for the overarching review of antecedents of placement.

This study found a strong relationship between the care environment and resilience in orphaned and separated adolescents and youths (OSAY) in western Kenya. Care environment and resilience each independently demonstrated strong relationships with peer support, social support, and participating in volunteer activities. Resilience also had a strong relationship with familial support. These data suggest that resilience can be developed through strategic supports to this vulnerable population.

South Korea experienced international scrutiny over its irregular intercountry adoption practices in the 1980s. However, it eventually came to be viewed as a model of transparent and efficient adoptions. This façade disguises an orphan adoption system that has become entrenched over the decades. Today, adoptees continue to lobby for their right to origins. This paper explores South Korea’s laws and policies, which nullified the rights of adoptees, and it calls for receiving countries to assume co-responsibility to restore these rights.

This report provides analysis of all up-to-date LA sufficiency strategies with a focus on identifying (I) the main perceived challenges for local authorities (LAs) to meet their sufficiency duty, (II) what actions are being undertaken or planned by LAs to improve commissioning outcomes, and (III) perceived negative consequences associated with using certain commissioning or market shaping approaches. This work was commissioned by the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care.

The migration of parents is believed to be for the sake of children and families left behind. However, its impact on children left behind has been overlooked in Southern Wollo, Ethioipia. The impact of parental migration on the education and behavioral outcomes of children left behind has to be investigated in the migration-prone area. The objective of this study was to examine the impact of the migration of parent(s) on the education and behavioral outcomes of children left behind.

Introduction

This is a recording of the first session in a webinar series celebrating the launch of of a themed issue of Global Childhood Studies journal (Volume.2; Issue.1). This first webinar focuses on Responding to varied experiences of childhood separation.

Through 2020 and 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic led to prolonged school closures in Uganda. These closures exacerbated sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) against girls.

The Toolkit for Community Child Protection Volunteers and supplementary training manual aim to promote evidence-informed best practices when engaging community volunteers in child protection responses. This toolkit is based on the Community Engagement in Case Management study, which was commissioned by the Alliance and completed in 2020.

This Handbook explains the processes of the Foster Care Programme based on the “Manual on Foster Care for UASC”, which sets the minimum standards for providing foster care for children without parents or an adult to care for them in Malaysia.