Displaying 1 - 10 of 13
For centuries, residential child and youth care systems worldwide have provided homes for vulnerable children and adolescents. The implementation of children's rights, especially the right of participation, is assessed as an important base for promoting the best interests of the child in an out-of-home care environment.
Featuring contributions from distinguished international authors, this volume offers an in-depth understanding of crucial participation processes and underlying power structures when involving young people in decision-making about their care and everyday life in different…
Abstract
The assessment of prospective adoptive parents is a complex task for professional social workers. In this study, we examine the structure and function of professional social workers’ follow-up questions in assessment talk with adoption applicants. The analysis shows that adoption assessment through interviews involved a delicate and complex task that was accomplished by using a particular genre of institutional talk. This both invited the applicants’ extended and ‘open-ended’ responses and steered these responses and their development towards the institutionally relevant topics.…
Abstract
According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and Swedish legislation, children have the right to participate in child protection proceedings. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyse the notion of age and maturity in child protection proceedings in order to elucidate how these aspects could influence children's rights to participate. We focus on the view of three groups of actors involved in child protection proceedings in Sweden—social workers, lawyers, and laypersons in social welfare boards and administrative courts—and on how children's age and maturity…
Abstract
Prior research has reported a positive impact of adoption on developmental outcomes for children with experience of foster care. To inform decisions about permanent care arrangements, we 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). We constructed 14 outcome…
Abstract
Objective Our aim was to investigate whether the risk of depression in adulthood in children raised by substitute parents from an early age differ by care arrangements.
Methods Register study in Swedish national cohorts born 1972–1981, with three study groups of children raised in adoptive or foster homes with care starting before the age of 2 years and a comparison majority population group. Cox regression estimated HRs of prescribed antidepressive medication and specialised psychiatric care with a diagnosis of depression in…
Introduction
This guidance aims to raise awareness of the importance of children and young people in alternative care settings being able to make, influence and participate in decisions about their own lives, and other matters affecting them. It emanates from the Involved by Right European project 2011-13, funded by the European Commission’s Daphne III programme.
Involved by Right was a partnership between the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) in England, Helsingborg local authority in Sweden and the local Social Health Unit in Bassano del Grappa, Italy, as well as…
Abstract
Through adoption, the state actively contributes to creating families. It therefore also assumes the role of guarantor of the child's best interests in the adoption process, which entails assessing the suitability of presumptive adoptive parents. In the present paper, we use the concluding sections of assessment reports on applicants for intercountry adoption in Sweden to answer the following question: what must be said about an individual or a couple in order for her/them to be seen as a suitable adoptive parent? We thus assume that report conclusions serve to display parent…
The transition from care is a critical phase for care leavers in general, and even more complex for those who have arrived in Sweden as unaccompanied minors and belong to an ethnic minority group. The aim of this article is to examine unaccompanied minors’ experiences of leaving care, and to explore the experience in relation to perceptions about ethnicity and culture within a transnational space. Interviews were completed with 11 care leavers who had been received in Sweden as unaccompanied minors. The results show that these young people have to deal with multiple adjustments. Conquering…
This literature review by the Rees Centre for Research in Fostering and Education at the University of Oxford was undertaken to identify the ways in which carers’ children might be more effectively prepared and supported when their families are fostering. When a family experiences the transformation to a family who fosters, there will be many changes in family relations and general family life. Yet the impact of fostering on the lives of the sons and daughters of foster carers has largely been overlooked both in research and practice. This review included…
This book features individual empirical studies on the outcomes and progress made for children in foster care around the world. The studies are organized into three parts. The first part, ‘Placement Movements and Destinations,’ includes studies from the United States, Netherlands, Spain and Australia on placement stability and reunification, among other topics. The second part, ‘The Foster Care Experience: A Life Course Perspective,’ includes studies from the UK and the US. And the final part, ‘Psychological Outcomes and Correlates of Outcomes,’ describes studies and research from the UK,…