Children Living Apart from Their Parents: Highlights from the National Survey of Children in Nonparental Care

This paper highlights the characteristics and experiences of the approximately 2.3 million U.S. children who live with neither biological nor adoptive parents, but instead live with relatives or non-relatives in foster care or less formal arrangements outside the foster care system. It presents an overview of descriptive results from the 2013 National Survey of Children in Nonparental Care (NSCNC), the first large-scale, population-based, nationally-representative survey to focus on issues specific to this group of children. NSCNC was conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics and sponsored by ASPE.