Informal And Formal Kinship Care Tables And Figures

The chapters in this rich synthesis of National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being data represent thoughtful and increasingly sophisticated approaches to the problems highlighted in the study and in child welfare research in general.

Kinship foster care involves placing children who cannot live at home in foster care with other members of their family or close network. This book sheds light on different aspects of kinship care development and practice. Using a 20-year longitudinal research study from Norway, this book shows the historical development of kinship care in Norway, research on kinship care, and how family life and relations are negotiated and lived in the span between private and public sphere. It includes the perspectives of the children, their parents and their relatives who have functioned as foster parents. Recognising that kinship care is complex, and needs to be understood and studied from different perspectives, the book describes, analyses and discusses a number of subjects: kinship care in a child welfare historical context, families who are part of kinship care and their perspectives, the formal frameworks around kinship care, and research approaches which have dominated research into kinship care. This book will be of interest to all scholars, students and professionals working in social work and child welfare more broadly, both in the Nordic countries and in a wider international context.

Older adults caring for developmentally disabled children have special needs. Are you and your agency doing all you can to help? Grandparents as Carers of Children with Disabilities: Facing the Challenges provides the first comprehensive picture of grandparents caring for children with developmental disabilities and their related requirements. Here you'll find information on the mental and physical health of these caregivers, highlighting their unique needs and the roles that agencies and advocates need to play in order to meet them. This unique volume will assist practitioners, administrators, and policymakers in including the needs of this group into planning and service delivery efforts. Grandparents as Carers of Children with Disabilities: Facing the Challenges takes an incisive look at: characteristics of these carers and the children they care for children in kinship care and their special needs the effect of kinship foster care on caregiving grandmothers the approach of Latino grandparents to bringing up children with special needs the service needs and provision issues of grandparent carers In this book, here is some of what you'll find: data from a school-based comprehensive multigenerational program in East Harlem, New York City, which explores environmental stressors associated with children coming into kinship care, discussing the impact on grandparent caregivers, with a focus on health status and access to care correlates of self-reported depressive symptoms among urban Latino grandparent caregivers a survey of grandparents (mostly African American, mostly female) caring for children with developmental disabilities in New York City that focuses on health status, emotional state, use of formal and informal services, and general life situation helpful charts and tables that put the facts at your fingertips a demonstration project that used an intervention model to determine how a three-pronged approach using outreach, support groups, and case management could be used to aid grandparents caring for children with developmental delay or disabilities ... and much more! As editors McCallion and Janicki point out, ”Primary childcare is rapidly becoming a normative experience of grandparenting. Grandparent primary care is found among all ethnic groups, and across all socioeconomic levels of society. Concern over preserving the family often causes grandparents to assume responsibility in spite of their limited financial means or own health conditions.” Grandparents as Carers of Children with Disabilities will enable you to provide these courageous, loving people with the help they need to do this extraordinarily difficult and often thankless job.

Caregiving has emerged as a critical issue in the second half of the life cycle. With the growth of the older population, there have been dramatic increases in the number of people needing care and assistance. The responsibility for care typically falls on families at a time when they have limited resources to meet these needs. At a societal level, the need for care for growing numbers of disabled elders poses a major challenge for how to organize supportive services in an efficient and responsive system. Bringing together multiple perspectives on caregiving, the authors' explore informal and formal family caregiving and the pivotal issue of how these systems interface and interact. An overview of this variation is provided by examining family caregiving from three perspectives: * the effects of culture on helping patterns and family responsibility, * how different disabilities affect patterns of family care, and * longitudinal perspectives on the impact that caregiving has on family members.

International media regularly features horrific stories about Chinese orphanages, especially when debating international adoption and human rights. Much of the popular information is dated and ill-informed about the experiences of most orphans in China today, Chinese government policy, and improvements evident in parts of China. Informal kinship care is the most common support for the orphaned children. The state supports orphans and abandoned children whose parents and relatives cannot be found or contacted. The book explores concrete examples about the changing experiences and future directions of Chinese child welfare policy. It is about the support to disadvantaged children, including abandoned children in the care of the state, most of whom have disabilities; HIV affected children; and orphans in kinship care. It identifies how many orphans are in China, how they are supported, the extent to which their rights are met, and what efforts are made to improve their rights and welfare provision. When our research about Chinese orphans started in 2001, these children were almost entirely voiceless. Since then, the Chinese government has committed to improving child welfare. We argue that a mixed welfare system, in which state provision supplements family and community care, is an effective direction to improve support for orphaned children. Government needs to take responsibility to guarantee orphans’ rights as children, and support family networks to provide care so that children can grow up in their own communities. The book contributes to academic and policy understanding of the steps that have been taken and are still required to achieve the goal of a child welfare system in China that meets the rights of orphans to live and thrive with other children in a family.

ÔFinally, here is a book that provides a long-overdue holistic analysis of childcare. Written in a clear style, The Costs of Children breaks new ground in demonstrating how political choices about childcare have different impacts on equality of opportunity in Europe. After reading this book, one never again will view childcare as a private concern. It is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the realities of European integration, democratic policy-making and the gendered consequences of bearing and rearing children.Õ Ð Yvonne Galligan, QueenÕs University Belfast, UK This informative book explores the fair allocation of the costs of childcare in European countries and suggests that greater choice is required to reduce the current tendency to discriminate against mothers. The expert contributors provide an assessment of how countries can handle the fair allocation of the costs of childcare. They look at the experience within Europe in recent years and show in particular how these interrelate with the objectives of improving income, employment and social inclusion. The bookÕs conclusion reveals that choice is the key ingredient as families have different views and different degrees of support available from their relatives. Income and social inclusion can provide choice but ironically employment does not always. An employment-based model can sometimes narrow peopleÕs choices, particularly for people on low wages. The major concern is that most existing systems effectively discriminate against mothers. This is the first book to consider the democratic implications of social welfare systems. It provides an up-to-date assessment of the pressures on parents in deciding how to raise their children under restricted incomes. For many families, practical decisions about childcare are found at a local level. These will depend on the immediate factors that affect them, such as the availability of local nurseries or a family's ability to draw on voluntary networks of support. What is clear, however, is that many of these arrangements discriminate against women. Researchers and practitioners in the field of social policy and childcare in particular will find this book insightful. Graduate students of social policy will also find some practical examples to make their courses more relevant.