This paper considers therapeutic approaches to residential care with specific attention to the question of family involvement. It builds on a body of literature indicating the potential of residential care as a positive intervention for young people, and examines the contention that – even when family problems contribute to a young person's accommodation in residential care – family involvement could improve long-term outcomes. The literature reviewed indicates that family involvement is indeed important. Mixed research findings reflect the diversity of approaches to family-centred practice, but there is evidence of benefits in relation to a range of child outcomes. However, the literature also shows that family-centred residential care is not easy to achieve. More than parent–child contact, it entails genuine involvement of parents, in decision-making and in children's daily lives. Professionals – including social workers and residential care workers – must not only be concerned with the care and development of the child, but also with the role of the parent in their child's development, understood within an ecological perspective

At a time of heightened international debate about youth precarity, how do we understand and support transitions to adulthood for people who have been in care? This paper reports on a qualitative longitudinal study of 75 young adults (aged 16-32 years) from Norway, Denmark, and England. All had been in care during childhood and at the time of their recruitment to the study all were in education, employment or training. Against the context of a literature largely focused on transitions specific to 'leaving care', our analysis addresses aspects of early adulthood which are not specific to being care experienced; some (such as romantic breakups, or moving home) might be considered normative, whilst others (such as changing course or dropping out of university) are less common. Cross-national analysis shows how care and wider welfare systems intersect with informal networks in everyday lives, functioning to scaffold young people, or to exacerbate precarity, as they navigate biographical transitions in early adulthood. The research shows the importance of developing socially and culturally located biographical accounts of 'transition' that recognise the complexities, uncertainties and essential interdependence of everyday lives and emerging adulthoods.

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This article seeks to trouble the concept of “family” for young people who have been in out-of-home care, by reflecting on the continuing significance (and troubles) of family relationships beyond childhood. The analysis draws on two cross-national studies in Europe: Beyond Contact, which examined policies and systems for work with families of children in care, and Against All Odds?, a qualitative longitudinal study of young adults who have been in care. Policy discourses that reify and instrumentalize the concept of family—for example, through the language of “contact,” “reunification,” and “permanence”—neglect the complex temporality of “family” for young people who have been in care, negotiated and practiced across time and in multiple (and changing) care contexts, and forming part of complex, dynamic and relational identities, and understandings of “belonging” for young adults who have been in care.

In England, placement within the looked after system is not viewed as a desirable long-term solution for most children, and policy has prioritised continued contact with parents, and swift return home, wherever possible. This review examines policy approaches to work with families of looked after children in England and in three other European countries: Denmark, France and the Netherlands, aiming to identify areas for shared learning in relation to this challenging area of policy and practice. The research highlights relationships between care populations and policy understandings of the purpose of work with families, including understandings of children's and/or parents' rights.

The research literature on parenting support typically focuses on Englishspeaking countries, such as England, the United States and Australia. This article draws on a review, commissioned by the English government, which examined policies and services to support parenting in five European countries: Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, and considered the evidence for effectiveness. In exploring differences between the five countries, and with England, this article raises questions about the way in which understandings of 'what works' can inform the ways in which support for parents and families is designed and delivered. An emphasis on formal outcome evaluations, as in England, favours the use of standardised parenting programmes, which are more amenable to evaluation of effectiveness using quasi-experimental research designs. In some other European countries, support for parents and families is embedded in universal service provision, rather than a discrete, time-limited 'intervention', and hence evaluation is more likely to involve assessment of individual progress (is this working for this family?) rather than assessment of the overall efficiency of a standardised programme.

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This book presents innovative international research into how the term “environment” is understood within families and how that plays out in everyday lives. Based on a study that involved creative qualitative work with families in India and the United Kingdom, the book shows how environmental practices are negotiated in families, and how they relate to values, identities, and society. Through that analysis, we begin to see the ways in which families and childhood are constructed as sites for intervention in debates about climate change. The book explores the situated, dynamic, and relational complexities, and of the ways in which space, place, and time intersect with meanings of environment in the everyday lives of children and families. It looks at the sort of environmental issues that families in India and the UK negotiate, and how children are often responsibilised in environmental policy and media discourses in both India and the UK.