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In Scotland residential units for children remain largely in the hands of local authorities. A reluctance to plan for and use such services as a positive choice results in many children being placed as a last resort. Two research studies gathered data over a six‐month period and considered seven local authorities' admissions to children's units, allowing for in‐depth exploration of the manner in which children are being placed in residential care. The studies revealed a significant number of children aged under 12 being admitted to residential care, many placements of a very short duration, poor evidence of placement planning, substantial numbers of sibling groups being separated and admitted to different residential care settings and many instances of residential placements being used when not the preferred option. The implications of the findings are discussed and possible solutions offered as to how the residential sector can be developed to achieve the wide range of roles it is currently expected to fulfil.

Children who enter the care system in England and Wales are among some of the most vulnerable children in society, often presenting with high levels of need. Ensuring that the children's workforce has the skills and knowledge to meet the challenges of caring for this group of children has been at the forefront of policy agendas over the past two decades. This paper aims to report on an educational initiative to develop the capacity of residential childcare staff to work therapeutically with children.

The paper describes the origins and nature of the Foundation Degree in Therapeutic Childcare and documents the reflections of tutors responsible for delivering the programme on their experiences. Comments from a small student sample are included to highlight the student perspective in studying for the Foundation Degree.

The paper concludes that while some barriers exist in delivering the Foundation Degree to residential child care workers, programmes designed to develop knowledge and understanding of working therapeutically with children should be promoted.

The paper highlights some of the issues and challenges associated with educating the children's workforce and reports back on one of the first Foundation Degrees in the UK focusing on residential and foster care workers.

This paper examines the issues of front‐line workers within residential childcare, giving their feelings on how recent government sponsored quality enhancement initiatives have impacted on service delivery. Residential childcare has been at the forefront of government sponsored quality developments since the early 1990s. It reflects many of the problems and dilemmas faced by the wider personal social services sector when applying performance enhancement techniques. It has low status, is poorly resourced, and provides a service for “customers” who have multiple needs, but have little say in relation to their referral for provision. The findings from this study give support to the contention that for front‐line workers, many of the government's quality initiatives are limited or irrelevant to the “real” task of providing a service to residents – continuous improvement requires the practical benefits of a structured and planned performance enhancement culture, and the appropriate resources to achieve that goal.

The commercial and residential refuse generated by Ellsworth Air Force Base, USA was characterized and analyzed for collection procedures, and the opportunities for increasing the amount of solid waste that could be recycled were evaluated.

Random loads of hauled solid waste (an average 3.0 US tons/load) from different waste streams of Ellsworth Air Force Base were sorted. The weight fraction of each category of recyclable material derived from the hand sorting operations was applied to the three years of mixed waste tonnage in order to estimate the tonnage of each recyclable category disposed of as refuse during each year. The assessment of the data obtained from three full calendar years focused on the mixed solid waste generated from commercial and residential areas such as offices, childcare, lodging, supermarkets, food service facilities, and others.

Over 2,500 tones of recycling opportunities were missed during the 1999‐2001 calendar years. The characterizations of the total weight produced from commercial and residential waste streams showed that recyclable material constituted 35.95 percent and 23.27 percent of refuse from the commercial and the residential areas, respectively. The amounts of total recyclable material as missed opportunities for recycling were found to be 1,728 tons and 715 tons from the commercial and residential areas.

In response to the findings, Ellsworth Air Force Base has implemented a number of strategies for increased recovery of recyclables from its solid waste streams.

Quantifying missed opportunities for recycling is a useful action in planning future recycling operations aimed at best solid waste management practices.

Research on caregivers’ experiences of and perspectives on preparing young people to leave care in Africa is lacking. A clearer understanding of caregivers’ practice and experience is important for developing improved care-leaving services. The aim of this study is to describe the experiences and perceptions of caregivers providing care-leaving services at one residential care institution in Addis Abba, Ethiopia.

A qualitative description research design was used to examine the perspectives of seven caregivers and three key informants concerning the preparation of female care-leavers for leaving care and their readiness to lead an adult life in Ethiopia. Participants were purposively selected and data were collected through focus group discussions and in-depth interviews. The generated data were analysed using thematic analysis.

Caregivers are passionate about their work, seeing it more as a calling than as a job, and think of themselves as parents to the children. Most reported receiving at least some training, albeit informal or ad hoc, and faced challenges because of lack of resources. Regarding their preparation of the girls for leaving care, caregivers reported inadequate success in financial literacy and savings, continued schooling, cooking, cultural literacy and aftercare support.

This study thus underscores the absence of a preparation for leaving care practice guideline and an independent policy that guides care-leaving in Ethiopia. Policy improvement on caregiving that recognises and values the complexity of the job of caregiving, and thus the need for greater education, is highly needed. This paper sheds light on the issue of supporting caregivers’ attempt to mentor female care-leavers in Ethiopia.

This article reviews the contents of the previous year's editions of the Journal of Children's Services (Volume 2, 2007), as requested by the Journal's editorial board. It draws out some of the main messages for how high‐quality scientific research can help build good childhoods in western developed countries, focusing on: the need for epidemiology to understand how to match services to needs; how research can build evidence of the impact of prevention and intervention services on child well‐being; what the evidence says about how to implement proven programmes successfully; the economic case for proven programmes; the urgency of improving children's material living standards; how to help the most vulnerable children in society; and, lastly, the task of measuring child well‐being.

By using ethnographic data and family interviews from eight families in Taipei, Taiwan, this paper aims to delineate how multigenerational families implement parents’ child-rearing values, and how these strategies vary by social class. The primary focus is the child’s mother and her relationship with other family members. I ask the following question: How does a mother in a three-generation family implement her ideal parenting values for her child while being encumbered by the constraints of her parents-in-law? Additionally, how does this intergenerational dynamic vary with family socioeconomic status? To conceptualize this process in such a complex context, I argue that we must understand parenting behaviors as acts of “doing family” and “intensive mothering.”

From 2008 to 2009, I conducted a pilot survey in two public elementary schools to recruit the parents of sixth-grade students. All eight cases of multigenerational families in this paper were selected randomly after being clustered by the parent’s highest education level and family income levels. This paper utilized the mothers’ interviews as the major source to analyze, while the interviews of other family members served as supplementary data.

Two cases, Mrs Lee and Mrs Su’s stories, were selected here to illustrate two distinctive approaches toward childrearing in multi-generational families. Results indicate that white-collar mothers in Taiwan hold the value of concerted cultivation and usually picture the concept of intensive mothering as their ideal image of parenthood. Yet, such an ideal and more westernized child-rearing philosophy often leads to tensions at home, particularly between the mother and the mother-in-law. Meanwhile, blue-collar mothers tend to collaborate with grandparents in sharing childcare responsibilities, and oftentimes experience friction over child discipline in terms of doing homework and material consumption.

Via this analysis of three-generation families in Taiwan, we are able to witness the struggle of contemporary motherhood in East Asia. This paper foregrounds the negotiations that these mothers undertake in defining ideal parenting and the ideal family. On the one hand, these mothers must encounter the new parenting culture, given that the cultural ideal of concerted cultivation has become a popular ideology. On the other hand, by playing the role of daughter-in-law, they must negotiate within the conventional, patriarchal family norms.

This chapter focuses on ways of giving voice to the survivors of institutional abuse and how their contribution can be capitalised in raising community awareness of this phenomenon. The collection of testimonies demonstrates that institutional abuse is a common and widespread phenomenon that in most cases remains unrevealed throughout the life course. The participatory research process we describe is part of an important social and clinical intervention developed in the framework of two projects. The chapter illustrates outputs and outcomes related to disclosure of institutional abuse and its long-term consequences, as well as the meaning and implications of collective trauma. Results confirm the need to promote the voice of survivors to build a new professional and community culture and sensitisation towards children's right to be heard as an essential instrument to prevent and detect institutional ill treatment. Participatory processes can overcome the resistance of individuals, professional communities and politicians to recognising the phenomenon, emphasising institutional responsibilities and the specific effects of a serious form of maltreatment that requires extraordinary and specific interventions in terms of intensity and flexibility. This chapter describes a fieldwork and research experience made possible thanks to a strong alliance with survivors who engaged in a process of reflection and theoretical elaboration that generated both social and clinical impacts.