In the event of the breakdown of the original family, institutional care has for many decades been the preferred alternative to family substitute care or aid to the original family. The origins of this practice can be traced to the 1950s, when foster families were cancelled by the communist...

Service integration for foster children has recently improved following scholarly recommendations (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2001) that sparked federal action to integrate child welfare services with intervention services for children with special needs, as well as with local education and Medicaid...

This paper investigates how the type of home environment – family foster care or residential care – affects the adult outcomes of individuals who were raised in state care during adolescence. While it is established in the literature that living in residential care is detrimental for babies,...

In the United States, prospective foster parents must become licensed by a child welfare agency before a foster child can be placed in their care. This paper contributes by developing a theoretical matching model to study the optimal menu of licenses designed to screen foster parents. We...

Kinship care represents 46% of all out-of-home care placements in Spain and 80% of all foster care placements. Therefore, the role of fostering relatives, most of whom (about 70%) are grandparents, is particularly relevant in the Spanish child care system.