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The impact of apartheid, destabilization, and warfare in southern Africa has especially taken a severe and unimaginable toll on the future and life chances of children in the region. Prior to 1990 when a series of significant events changed the social and economic landscape of the sub-continent, a number of disturbing profiles and trends pointed to a desolate situation for children and women by most child welfare, household, poverty, education, and health indicators. As a result of massive underdevelopment compounded by war and economic destabilization for decades, only aggravated by colonialism and post-colonial policies, the health and welfare of children in southern Africa had reached tragic proportions.

The study covers two different forms of financial support for households, income support for single parents and reimbursements for depression medicines, and explores their relationships with the demand for child protection services.

The data were retrieved from the Sotkanet, the Finnish Indicator Bank, and included 292 Finnish municipalities. It was hypothesised that the effect of income support for single-parent households on the need for child protection is mediated by reimbursements for depression medicines. The hypotheses were tested by using a conditional process analysis program, PROCESS (Model 4).

It was found that income support reduces the proportion of reimbursements for depression medicines in a municipality, which in turn reduces the need for child protection services. At the level of social policy, the study tentatively suggests that the social welfare system may affect the demand for child protection by investing in income support for single-parent households.

The choice of variables does not fully explain the effect of the mechanism. The relationships that are found in this study can have hidden factors which affect them. Further, the data have only 292 cases, which is quite a small sample, and is limited to Finland.

The study suggests that the social welfare system may affect the demand for child protection by investing in income support for single-parent households.

This article analyses policy changes in policing and child welfare and discusses the dilemmas faced by the police in respect of policing juveniles in a post‐Every Child Matters multi‐agency landscape. It will argue that in a climate where concern with social control appears to eclipse a concern with child welfare and a lack of clarity for the police and the increasing dependence on managerialistic processes, more children and young people may be drawn into the youth justice system.

This article focuses on children’s social quality. Social quality can be understood as the extent to which people can engage in the social, economic, and cultural lives of their communities, under conditions that strengthen their well-being and potential. This article has two purposes. The first is to develop a league table ranking 23 countries’ children’s social quality based on comparative data. The second is to examine the correlation between these countries' commitment to promoting children’s social quality and reducing the child care gap, where childcare is insufficiently covered by child care leave or Early Childhood Education and Care.

We analyse the findings obtained from the children’s social quality league table and the child care gap league table for the 23 countries.

The findings reveal mixed relationships between the children’s social quality league table and the child care gap league table. These findings indicate that we cannot assume that countries prioritizing the reduction of the child care gap automatically possess the capacity or willingness to promote other aspects of children’s welfare. They also highlight the significance of encouraging countries to enhance their children’s social quality as a way to promote children’s welfare rather than solely reducing the child care gap.

Children’s social quality is a new research area. To explore it, this article makes an innovative attempt by exploring the connection between social quality, children’s welfare, and the child care gap. The league table of children’s social quality this article developed is the first of its kind.

Since the 1990s, the importance of childhood and children within the political agenda of advanced welfare states has grown rapidly. For example, in 1989 the Canadian House of Commons launched a resolution aimed at eliminating poverty among Canadian children by the year 2000. With the help of the National Children's Agenda and the National Child Benefit the situation of children should be improved. Nearly 10 years later in the UK, New Labour heralded the political goal to halve child poverty within 10 years and to eradicate it within 20 years. A wide variety of measures and programs like Sure Start and the National Childcare Strategy were started to improve the welfare and well-being of children. In 2002, a new paradigm was established in Germany concerning family policy. The aim was to improve the reconciliation of family and work, the material welfare of young families by a new parental leave scheme, as well as supporting the development of young children by increasing the number of places for children under the age of 3 in early childhood education and care. Additionally, international organisations contributed to this trend. For example, the OECD (cf. 2001, 2006) propagated the development of early childhood education and care (ECEC) as an important contribution to a successful transition into the knowledge society. According to the Lisbon-Strategy, the EU announced new goals for policies concerning children and families as well as introduced benchmarks for evaluating the implementation of these goals in the member states. Finally, in an influential evaluation for the EU President, Esping-Andersen (cf. 2002) and his colleagues argued for a concept of a “child-centered social investment strategy.”

This study aims to offer understanding of the parent – child relationship by examining, through a socio-material lens, how one aspect of the new child surveillance technology market, child GPS trackers (CGT), are rejected or adopted by families, highlighting implications for child welfare, privacy and children’s rights policy.

The authors gathered netnographic data from a range of online sources (parenting forums, online product reviews, discussion boards) that captured parental views towards the use of CGT and stories of the technology in use and theorize the data through application of a novel combination of neutralisation and affordance theory.

The research reveals how critics of CGT highlight the negative affordances of such product use (highlighting the negative agency of the technology). Parental adopters of CGT, in turn, attempt to rationalize their use of the technology as a mediator in the parent – child relation through utilisation of a range of neutralisation mechanisms which re-afford positive product agency. Implications for child welfare and policy are discussed in the light of those findings.

The paper presents an empirical, qualitative understanding of parents negotiating the emergence of a controversial new child-related technology – CGT – and its impact upon debates in the field of parenting and childhood; develops the theory of parental style towards parental affordances, using a socio-material theoretical lens to augment existing sociological approaches; and contributes to the debates surrounding child welfare, ethics, privacy and human rights in the context of child surveillance GPS technologies.

The economic reforms which turned the centrally planned economy to a market economy have profoundly changed the tripartite relationship between the state, work unit, and citizen in urban China and brought significant changes to the institutional care provision for young children. The aim of this paper is to investigate the changes to the institutional care since 1980, with particular emphasis on the most recent years from mid‐1990s, and explore how the institutional care has changed over the recent decades without a clear institutional basis.

The analysis draws on second‐hand materials from published literature, a range of longitudinal national and local statistics and policy documents, and also on first‐hand information which was collected in Beijing from in‐depth interviews with key informants and case studies of different kinds of kindergartens.

The paper finds that the previous work‐unit based public care system has changed to a much more complicated care mix in which the roles of the state, employer, community, market and the informal sector of the family in terms of provision and funding have all changed significantly.

The findings of this paper may help to inform appropriate policy responses in Chinese child care provision. The study suggests that formal care provision should be expanded towards universal access regardless of people's income and employment status in China.

The paper questions and complicates the “state withdrawal” representation of social welfare change and argues that it is not “the state” but “the work unit and community organization” retreat from public care provision. It also argues that the change in the role of the state has been multifaceted, and not a simple one‐directional movement of marketization in which the state retreated from welfare provision in entirety.

In the past 40 years, both health policy and educational policy in England have adopted commitments to reducing socially created inequalities. However, an inequalities perspective has only begun to emerge in relation to child protection, and child welfare services more widely. The purpose of this paper is to chart evidence of these green shoots of a new policy direction which focusses on two aspects: equalising service provision and outcomes for looked after children.

The paper provides an analysis of trends in policies as expressed in official documents, research studies and policy statements.

The paper outlines the argument for a more comprehensive approach to addressing inequalities in child protection and child welfare services, and concludes by suggesting some implications for policy and practice.

The paper develops the concept of an inequalities perspective in child protection and outlines key implications.

The causes and variations of social and material welfare form a widespread theme. Classical sociology attended primarily to social class, whereas modern sociology looks at variables such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality and physical and mental ability. Generation or age is proposed as an additional variable to social and material inequalities. Statistical offices have divided income by age brackets and accounted for ‘age-related’ public spending for decades, but it is only relatively recently that generational variations have been theorized. Structure-oriented scholars within social studies of childhood have suggested comparing and confronting the condition of children vis-à-vis the condition of adults and the elderly.

This article considers the independent liberty interests of children in foster care and their mothers in parental termination proceedings. Recent federal reforms impose a mandatory deadline for the state to terminate parental rights. That policy erroneously presumes that the passage of time alone establishes parental fault and satisfies a parent’s due process rights. It also fails to protect the minority of children who assert an interest in preserving a safe relationship with mothers who are unlikely to meet the state’s schedule – including many substance abusers and victims of domestic violence.