Children raised in institutions experience psychosocial deprivation that has detrimental influences on attention and mental health. The current study examined patterns of attention biases in children from institutions who were randomized at approximately 21.6 months to receive either a high-quality foster care intervention or care-as-usual. At age 12, children performed a dot-probe task and ind...

As many as 3% of children in the United States live in kinship care arrangements with caregivers who are relatives but not the biological parents of the child. A growing body of evidence suggests that children who cannot live with their biological parents fare better, overall, when living with extended family than with nonrelated foster parents. Acknowledging this, federal laws and public polic...

As the UK Government White Paper, Care Matters: Time for Change, suggested, foster children need the care system to provide them with good quality foster family care that will help them through childhood to success and fulfilment of their potential in adult life. This paper draws on the third phase of Growing Up in Foster Care, a longitudinal study of 52 children in planned, long-term foster ca...

BACKGROUND Experiences in early life lay the foundation for later development and functioning. Severe psychosocial deprivation, as experienced by children in early institutional care, constitutes an adverse experience with long-term negative consequences. The Bucharest Early Intervention Project sought to examine the effects of foster care as an alternative to institutional care for abandoned i...

OBJECTIVE Since 1986, American parents have adopted >17300 children from Guatemala. This study assessed the health, growth, and developmental status of 103 Guatemalan adopted children (48 girls; 55 boys) after arrival in the United States. Physical evidence suggestive of prenatal alcohol exposure and adequacy of vaccinations administered were also reviewed. METHODS Retrospective chart review ...

Two groups of Romanian children were compared on spectral power and coherence in the electroencephalogram (EEG) in early childhood. One group consisted of previously institutionalized children who had been randomly assigned to a foster care intervention at a mean age of 23 months. The second group had been randomized to remain in institutional care. Because of a policy of noninterference, a num...

This paper reports on a longitudinal study of children growing up in long-term foster family care. It focuses attention on the challenges for foster carers in providing a secure base for foster children in middle childhood and early adolescence, who have come predominantly from backgrounds of abuse, neglect, and psychosocial adversity. Separation and loss in the children's lives, often through ...

BACKGROUND The AIDS epidemic has lead to an increase in orphaned children who need residential care. It is known that HIV leads to delayed motor development. However, the impact of place of residence on motor function has not been investigated in the South African context. The aim of the study was therefore to establish if children in institutionalised settings performed better or worse in term...

The foster care system attempts to prepare children and youth who have suffered child maltreatment for successful adult lives. This study documents the economic advantages of a privately funded foster care program that provided longer term, more intensive, and more expensive services compared to public programs. The study found significant differences in major adult educational, health, and soc...