Turning to youth care

Original title: Terecht in de jeugdzorg Young people in the Netherlands are generally doing well. But there are also problems: every year, the use of youth care services is found to have increased again. It is important to identify who the users of these services are, partly in the light of the transfer of responsibility for youth care services to local authorities from 2015. For example, what are the characteristics of the users? What problems do they have? Is there much overlap in the use of different services? And what reasons are there for using or not using youth care services? Answering questions such as these is not simple, partly because the Dutch youth care sector is currently rather fragmented. SCP has, since 2011, had access to data from a large-scale, representative survey of parents with children aged up to 18 years ,concerning the problems faced by young people and their parents or carers, as well as their use of youth care services. These data, make it possible to carry out a coherent study of the use of the various categories of youth care services. This report provides an insight into the occurrence of problems and the relationship between those problems and use of care. We do this by addressing two central questions: What are the determinants of the onset of serious child and parenting problems? and What is the relationship between the reported problems and the use of youth care services?