What does empathy sound like in social work communication? A mixed‐methods study of empathy in child protection social work practice

Amy Lynch, Fiona Newlands, Donald Forrester - Child & Family Social Work

This study contributes to the development of understanding of empathy as a social work skill through a mixed‐methods analysis of 110 audio recordings of meetings in a child protection service between workers and parents, applying a coding framework for analysis.

Adapting the Friends of the Children programme for child welfare system‐involved families

Amy M. Salazar, Kevin P. Haggerty, Susan Walsh, Bailey Noell, Erinn Kelley‐Siel - Child & Family Social Work

This paper reviews the Friends of the Children (FOTC) long‐term mentoring programme in the US and how it was adapted to serve children and families with child welfare system involvement.

The Therapeutic Family Care Program: A 10-year community implementation of Treatment Foster Care in Ontario, Canada

Dillon T. Browne, Jacqueline Johnson, Erin Beatty, Mary Price Cameron, Duane Durham, Aron Shlonsky - Developmental Child Welfare

The present study describes a community implementation of treatment foster care (TFC) for children and youth involved with child welfare in Ontario, Canada.

Outcomes in adulthood of adoption after long-term foster care: A sibling study

Anders Hjern, Bo Vinnerljung, Lars Brännström - Developmental Child Welfare

To inform decisions about permanent care arrangements, the authors of this study used Swedish national population registers to create a sibling population consisting of 194 children born 1973–1982 who had been in out-of-home care (OHC) at least 5 years before adolescence but were never adopted (50% boys) and their 177 maternal birth siblings who also had been in OHC at least 5 years before their teens but were adopted before adolescence (52.5% boys).

Supporting foster carers to meet the needs of looked after children: A feasibility and pilot evaluation of the Reflective Fostering Programme

Nick Midgley, Antonella Cirasola, Chloe Austerberry, Erica Ranzato, Grace West, Peter Martin, Sheila Redfern, Richard Cotmore, Theresa Park - Developmental Child Welfare

This study presents the feasibility and pilot evaluation of the Reflective Fostering Programme (RFP), a recently developed, group-based program to support foster carers, based on the concept of “reflective parenting.”

The challenges of designing a feasibility study of low cost home based interventions in family foster care

Baviskar, Siddhartha; Sørensen, Kresta Munkholt; Madsen Sjö, Nina - EUSARF 2018 Conference

It is well documented that children placed in out-of-home care in Denmark perform poorly on a wide range of short-term and long-term outcomes compared to other children. This paper describes the core components of an innovative project that will attempt to address some of the major weaknesses of previous interventions and which, if successful, will be rolled out across foster care families nationwide.

The effects of the KEEP foster parent training intervention on child externalizing and internalizing problems

Joseph M. Price, Scott Roesch, Cleo M. Burce - Developmental Child Welfare

The aims of this investigation were to (a) examine the effectiveness of the KEEP intervention at reducing behavior problems among children in foster care, as assessed by the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), during implementation of the intervention by a community agency using a randomized design and (b) determine whether the intervention is effective at reducing internalizing forms of behavior problems.

The neglect–enrichment continuum: Characterizing variation in early caregiving environments

Lucy S. King, Kathryn L. Humphreys, Ian H. Gotlib - Developmental Review

In this paper, the authors advance a framework for examining the nature and consequences of neglect, which they posit can be represented as variations along a continuum from severe psychosocial neglect to environmental enrichment.

Predictors of loneliness among the left-behind children of migrant workers in Indonesia

Cut Maghfirah Faisal, Sherly Saragih Turnip - Journal of Public Mental Health

The purpose of this paper is to compare loneliness between the left-behind children of migrant workers and the non-left-behind ones, and identify the most significant predictors of loneliness among the left-behind children.

ICTs as catalysts in child protection programmes: current landscape in South Asia & a concept to inform future use

Balwant Godara, Nihaalini Kumar, Frederique Boursin, Gatienne Jobit, Amara Amara, Thierry Agagliate - Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development

Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) are increasingly, and increasingly effectively, being used in development and humanitarian work. Whereas health and education lead this use, application to child protection remains sparse and ill-understood. This paper helps address these two gaps.