Parental Participation in Child Protection

Dear Colleagues,

The overarching aim of child protection and child welfare systems should be to support parents and families in the care of their children and to enable children to grow up in safe, loving, and nurturing families. Nevertheless, child welfare systems throughout the world too often fail to protect children, focusing on parental blame rather than family need, and they often do not provide the support families need, with increasing numbers of separated and, in some cases, harmed children in their care.

Given this background, this Special Issue aims to extend the evidence base and provide a space to hear parents’ accounts of the impact of increasing parent participation through parent advocacy in child welfare decision-making at the case, programme, and policy levels. We would value papers examining the opportunities and challenges parent advocacy creates; lessons learnt across different settings, countries, and contexts; and evidence of the benefits of supporting such engagement in system transformation.

We invite academic papers written in plain language, written by and with parents with lived experience of the child protection/child welfare system. If you are interested and would like to know more, please contact the Editorial Team. Tammy Mayes, Taliah Drayak and Nicola Lancaster (parents with lived experience) will act as assistant editors.

Prof. Andy Bilson
Dr. Simon Haworth
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Social Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• child protection
• parent participation
• parent advocacy
• child welfare
• co-production