Abstract

Federal, state, local, and nonprofit agencies in the United States spend over $40 billion each year to serve vulnerable children. Interactions with the child welfare system can profoundly alter children’s lives, ideally protecting children from harm and helping families thrive. This chapter describes key challenges for managing processes at three salient stages of the child welfare system: investigations and pre-removal services, foster care, and adoption. We highlight relevant operations-focused insights from child welfare researchers and the limited research on child welfare by economists and operations researchers. We also identify important issues to consider in future research and connect them to the operations management literature from related domains.