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Objectives of this study were to ascertain risk and protective factors in the adjustment of 78 school-age and teenage offspring of opioid- and cocaine-abusing mothers. Using a multimethod, multiinformant approach, child outcomes were operationalized via lifetime psychiatric diagnoses and everyday social competence (each based on both mother and child reports), and dimensional assessments of symptoms (mother report). Risk/protective factors examined included the child sociodemographic attributes of gender, age, and ethnicity, aspects of maternal psychopathology, and both mother's and children's cognitive functioning. Results revealed that greater child maladjustment was linked with increasing age, Caucasian (as opposed to African American) ethnicity, severity of maternal psychiatric disturbance, higher maternal cognitive abilities (among African Americans) and lower child cognitive abilities (among Caucasians). Limitations of the study are discussed, as are implications of findings for future research.

In this 2-year prospective study, psychopathology and competence among drug abusers' offspring were examined in relation to characteristics of their neighborhoods. The sample consisted of 77 children of cocaine and opioid addicts with a mean age of 12.3 years at baseline and 14.2 years at follow-up. Outcomes examined included psychiatric diagnoses, dimensional symptom indices, and aspects of everyday behavioral competence. Links involving neighborhood variables varied by gender, wherein boys reflected greater deterioration than girls when neighborhoods had high crime rates and high proportions of low-income households. Conversely, girls appeared to benefit more than boys from the presence of professional adults in the community. Overall, neighborhood indicators accounted for more variability in changes in child adjustment over time than did indices of maternal psychopathology. Findings are discussed in terms of developmental changes in the salience of exosystemic and familial forces, and implications for interventions are outlined.

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A B S T R AC TFor some youth in foster care, the closest family or family-like relationships are with the foster parents with whom they have lived for extended periods of time. Nonetheless, child welfare agencies often do not explore these relationships and the potential they may hold for youth for legal permanence through adoption or guardianship. Recognizing that social workers often lack resources to help them initiate permanency conversations, Casey Family Services, a direct service child welfare agency in the USA, developed a tool that social workers can use to explore youth's sense of emotional security with their foster parents and foster parents' sense of claiming and attachment with youth in their care. The research literature that suggests that emotional security is a critical component of successful permanence provided the foundation for the development of the Belonging and Emotional Security Tool (BEST). When used with youth and foster parents, the BEST was found to advance meaningful permanency conversations.