The social and emotional wellbeing of children in out-of-home care: A scoping review exploring structural and social factors

The social and emotional wellbeing of children in out-of-home care (OOHC) is a matter of concern to child protection authorities, carers, families, and the children themselves. A growing body of research suggests that children in OOHC experience higher rates of social and emotional adversity compared to the general population and this, in turn, has flow-on effects for many other life outcomes, such as educational attainment, employment, family relationships, and health and wellbeing throughout their life course. Further, it is established that children in OOHC are disproportionately drawn from families and communities subject to structural disadvantage. This is an important consideration given that structural disadvantage is a known contributor to lower social and emotional wellbeing across the life course.

In this paper we explore the extent to which social and structural factors are recognised in the definition and operationalisation of social and emotional wellbeing in contemporary research about children in OOHC. We use a scoping review methodology to examine the peer-reviewed research on social and emotional wellbeing of children in OOHC published over the past 10 years (2014–2023). We identify five themes in this literature. We find most of the research on social and emotional wellbeing of children in OOHC focuses on the mental health, and emotional and behavioural components of wellbeing, with limited engagement with social and structural components of wellbeing. The social dimensions of wellbeing are largely concerned with one-on-one interactions between children and their immediate social network, such as interactions with carers, family, school, and neighbourhood. We consider the implications of these findings for recommendations to improve the social and emotional wellbeing of children in OOHC to include the impacts of structural disadvantage on the wellbeing of children in OOHC.