One of the many challenges of studying the population
of children in out-of-home care is the fact that they are
not a single, homogenous group of children. Rather,
each child enters out-of-home care with a unique set
of vulnerabilities and strengths. Perhaps no subset of
the out-of-home care population is as distinct as the
infant population. In this brief, we argue that from
a policy perspective, infants represent a distinctive
subset of the foster care population with service needs
and developmental vulnerabilities and strengths
that distinguish them from other children in out-of home care.