I've mentioned before what a wonderful resource the Child Welfare Information Gateway Library subscriptions are to professionals, researchers and families.I subscribe to a number of their "Libraries" - adoption, permanency, prevention, well being, etc. Each month the CWIG gathers the newest research articles, practice guides and policy updates on a number of child welfare topics, [...]
Recently at CASCW's supportive housing training, the topic of full family (FF) foster care was brought up. This sparked my curiosity regarding current research on the effectiveness of FF foster care, which is also referred to as whole family foster care. In doing a brief search of the literature, it became apparent that the most [...]
A few weeks ago, we updated you on the new Adoption Assistance legislation that will go into effect in August 2012. Today we will summarize some of the other child welfare legislation that was enacted in the same legislative session. We will cover adoption policies in this post and in an upcoming post we will [...]
Earlier today in our Stability, Permanency & Adoption (SPA) blog, JaeRan blogged about data in the child welfare system as being "unorganized, uncentralized, and differ[ing] greatly depending on who is managing the data." She concluded with an explanation of how having better and shared data can help us better answer our questions about the wellbeing [...]
As someone who is interested in understanding the impact of adoption on children, youth, families, and social welfare systems, one of my biggest frustrations is that there seems to be concurrently an over-abundance of data, and yet the adoption data is very unorganized, un-centralized and differs greatly depending on who is managing the data. This [...]
Today the Star Tribune published an article by Jean Hopfensperger highlighting the changes that adoptive parents wanting to adopt internationally are now facing. These changes include increases in older children, sibling groups, and children with disabilities available for adoption, and a trend toward open adoptions, once considered impossible and/or improbable (even if desirable) a few [...]
One of the practice issues that has been rarely talked about in academic, research or policy arenas that impact children that have been institutionalized or in foster care is the issue of eating behaviors. It is quite common for children who have been neglected or for those who have experienced food insecurity, institutionalization in foreign [...]
We all know that the media often sensationalizes adoption - either portraying adoption as only bubbles and sunshine without addressing loss, grief, trauma and attachment concerns or conversely, negatively focusing on those cases of extreme behaviors on the part of either adopted children and youth or adoptive parents. Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, [...]