The second annual edition of the World Family Map has been published by Child Trends, providing fascinating information on global changes in the areas of family structure, family socioeconomics, family processes, and family culture. The report investigates how family characteristics affect children's healthy development around the globe and includes a new essay focusing on union stability and early childhood health in developing countries. This edition includes information on 16 indicators of family well-being selected by an expert group because of their known relationships to child outcomes in the research literature, across 49 countries, representing a majority of the world's population. The report highlights that "Families do not operate in a vacuum: their ability to provide for their children and supervise their development depends not only on parenting behaviors and attitudes but also on the social, economic, and policy environments that surround them." It also underlines that family living arrangements- how many parents are in the household and whether the household includes extended family members-  shape the character and contexts of children's lives, as well as the human resources available for children.

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Produced by the Faith to Action Initiative, with support from the Better Care Network, this publication is aimed at churches, faith-based organizations, and individuals of faith seeking evidence-based information about the best ways to care for orphans and children separated from parental care. It provides a concise overview of a range of studies and findings that can inform approaches to caring for children who, through orphanhood, abandonment, or other causes, have been separated from parental care. Included are current global estimates and key facts about orphans and children living in orphanages; an introduction to the range of care options, called the continuum of care; significant findings that demonstrate the importance of family based care and the limitations of orphanages; and interventions that strengthen family care and help prevent placement in orphanages. This guide strives to summarize key overall findings, while also providing examples within specific countries or regions, to further illustrate some of the general points.

This publication, produced by the Parenting in Africa Network (PAN), highlights the skillful parenting practices of several pastoral communities in Africa, including the Gabra and the Maasai people in Kenya, the Bozo community in Mali, the Ndebele of South Africa, and the Swahili community of the coastal strip of Africa. The aspects of parenting highlighted are: pre-birth mother care, post birth mother and child care, instilling skills in responsibility and respect, child-parent interaction, the role of fathers, sexuality and puberty, preparation for marriage, care of vulnerable children, and the role of extended family / living with grandparents.

In order to collect this data, PAN, in partnership with Africa Interactive Kenya Ltd, visited different destinations in Africa to learn and showcase indigenous positive parenting practices that are still used in Africa, but which are under threat because of modernisation.

Better Care Network (BCN), International Social Service (ISS), Save the Children, and SOS Children's Villages International, gave a presentation to the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACERWC) on the Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children.  The Committee met in Ethiopia on the 12th April 2014 with the purpose of discussing how to increase visibility, understanding and support for child protection systems strengthening and child care reform within this process. The objectives of the Alternative Care Briefing were to increase the understanding of, and recommendations on, the implementation of the Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children when reviewing State Party Reports and drafting general recommendations, and to create opportunities to promote the Guidelines on the 5th anniversary of their endorsement by the UN General Assembly.

This report, produced by the Centre for Social Protection at IDS with support from Family For Every Child, features the results of a study conducted in Rwanda which investigates the links between the cash transfer program "Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme (VUP)", child well-being, and children's care and family reunification.  VUP is an anti-poverty program in Rwanda aimed at alleviating the effects of poverty by providing families with cash transfers, paid employment on community asset-building projects, access to savings, credit, and financial institutions, and training to increase awareness and reach of VUP within the community. 

Among the main findings of the study, researchers discovered that the VUP plays a positive role in improving child well-being and quality of care and that the VUP can support family reunification. However, the results also suggest that services of the VUP do not benefit all children equally and that the VUP Public Works component may compromise carers' abilities to provide high quality care. Furthermore, there is a potential for misuse of the transfers on purchasing alcohol which can negatively affect household relations and children's care. Lastly, researchers also concluded that cash transfers may serve as an incentive for foster care placement and can have positive and negative effects. 

This report - produced by SOS Children's Villages International, the Centre for Excellence for Looked After Children in Scotland (CELCIS), and the University of Malawi - is based on a synthesis of eight assessments of the implementation of the Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children ("the Guidelines") in Benin, Gambia, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Togo, Zambia and Zimbabwe. It considers common challenges to implementing the Guidelines identified in the eight countries and provides a platform for effective advocacy to promote every child's right to quality care.

Among the key findings from this review of country assessments, the report finds that: there is insufficient provision of prevention services, children are unnecessarily admitted to alternative care and remain there for longer than necessary, there is a lack of formal care provision (specifically formal family-based care) which places more burden on informal care mechanisms without State support for carers, quality of residential care is inconsistent, children in residential care often do not have their individual needs met, and there are limited child protection systems in place. 

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Special Representative of the Secretary General on Violence Against Children, (SRSG on VAC), Marta Santos Pais, promoted a Cross-Regional Round Table on the prevention of violence in early childhood on June 30 and July 1 2014, hosted by the Government of Jamaica in co-operation with UNICEF. Representatives from the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the Council of the Baltic States, the Council of Europe, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the League of Arab States, MERCOSUR and the Latin-American and Caribbean Movement for Children (MMILAC) participated in in this meeting which celebrated the 25th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the 5th anniversary of the UN Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children.

The group met to assess progress achieved in the implementation of the recommendations of the UN Study on Violence against Children in their respective regions and to reinforce co-operation in the prevention and elimination of violence against children, in particular in early childhood. Among other conclusions, the group agreed to promote policies and initiatives aimed at supporting families and caregivers in their child-rearing responsibilities, including through responsive national social protection and child protection systems to strengthen families' capacity to raise young children in a safe, caring and loving environment, to prevent child abandonment and placement in residential care, and to promote the social inclusion of all young children, in particular those at special risk.

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In this important chapter of the Handbook of Child Well-Being, the authors review the findings from research on the cognitive and social-emotional development of children exposed to exposed to various natural experiments in which the quality of parenting or family environment could be placed on a continuum. The authors first review findings on the social-emotional and cognitive development of children reared in institutional care. As an illustration they present two studies involved children reared in institutions in Ukraine and Greece. Following this, they examine the evidence from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project where formerly institutionalized children were placed in foster care families and their development compared to children remaining in institutional care and children who had never been institutionalized. The authors then turn to adoption and present meta-analytic evidence in which the development of adoptees is compared to the development of children growing up in institutional care and in normative biological families. Finally, the influence of parenting is examined in more detail in a longitudinal adoption study in which the children were adopted shortly after birth (early adoption) and as a consequence did not experience severe early adversity (the Leiden Longitudinal Adoption Study). 

This article reviews some of the language and conceptual issues that need to be addressed to be able to meaningfully compare differential usage of residential childcare services (also referred to here as group-care) across national boundaries. The authors point out that residential care services in the child welfare sector, at least in Western and some 'transition' economies, come in a wide range of shapes and sizes and may, alternatively, consist of small children's homes, campus and community-based family group homes, group homes, residential respite facilities, youth hostels and refuges, and various types of supported living accommodation. They report wide variations in group-care usage in different jurisdictions.

The authors discuss some of the challenges in comparing the data across jurisdictions due to the use of different terminology, ways of calculating residential care population, including which forms of group care are included, as well as the different variables that must be considered, including the over-representation of particular population of children in some contexts, such as children from minority groups, but also children from different age groups. They argue for more systematic ways of describing and analyzing the aims and characteristics of residential settings, in order to enable meaningful comparisons to be made between outcomes from group-care regimes in different jurisdictions.

Save the Children has released a policy brief outlining its position on the use of institutional care for children. In the brief, Save the Children states "Save the Children believes that children are best cared for in either their own families or in a family-based setting in their own communities and that placing children in a child care institution, especially under the age of three, is hazardous to their health and development." The organisation points to the evidence that institutional care is often harmful to the physical, social, and intellectual development of children (especially those under the age of three) and how the mere presence of a child care institution can encourage child abandonment and divert much needed resources away from more positive care options. Save the Children urges States to implement the Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children, with special priority placed on ensuring appropriate care for children under the age of three. 

Save the Children calls upon governments, corporate actors, NGOs and donors to divert resources away from support to institutional care and towards family based care, including through reforms of child care systems and the adoption of an overall deinstitutionalisation strategy as part of a coordinated policy regarding children in need of alternative care. 

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The Prime Minister of Grenada, Honorable Dr. Keith Mitchell, presented the Call to Action during the 35th Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Conference of Heads of Government held in Antigua and Barbuda from 1-4 July 2014. He urged the Heads of State of the Caribbean region to commit to ending the placement of children under three years of age in residential care institutions. The Heads of Government received and supported the submission. 

A similar Call to Action was launched for the Latin American countries during the Ibero-American Summit of Heads of States celebrated in Panama in October 2013.

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This presentation by Kristen E. Cheney of the International Institute of Social Studies at the Hague, discusses the global shift in the definition of 'orphans' to include children with a living parent or parents. This misrepresentation has promoted a rhetoric of 'orphan rescue' in many Western countries and organizations, which in turn has fostered the growth of an "orphan industrial complex", according to Cheney. In many developing countries, 'orphaned' children become targets for rescue, driving donors and subsequently jeopardizing child protection and even driving the "production" of orphans as objects for intervention. This presentation pays particular attention to the way the "orphan industrial complex" is impacting child protection measures in Uganda.

Kenya: Child Adoption: Government accuses private agencies of commercializing adoption, NTV Kenya, 23 May 2014

The video presents a news clip from NTV Kenya reporting on recent changes in Kenyan adoption policy. According to the video, President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya recently signed an Executive Order making the Child Welfare Society of Kenya (CWSK) a state agency. This order has been signed in response to the recent privatization of adoption services, which the video says, saw the adoption process turned into a "money-making venture." This Executive Order, signed by the President, will change the adoption system, putting in place several measures that will see a complete overhaul of the adoption process in Kenya, including more protection of children's rights, a shift in adoption policy to favor local adoptions, and increased government oversight to ensure that children are leaving the country under proper circumstances.

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Cambodian Activist's Fall Exposes Broad Deception, New York Times, 14 June 2014

Recent controversy around the accuracy of a famed Cambodian woman's story of sex trafficking has shone a light on the current state of many Cambodian orphanages and their duplicitous practices. These orphanages, says the article, are exploiting the problem of poverty in Cambodia by coercing poor families into relinquishing care of their children. At the same time, the orphanages are exploiting the sympathy of foreigners by deceiving donors and pocketing financial contributions for personal gain.

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