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Homelessness, unemployment, and food insecurity are the unfortunate reality for many young adults who age out of the foster care system. These rates remain high even for youth who participate in independent living programmes prior to exiting foster care. These high rates of poor outcomes suggest that many foster care youth are inadequately prepared to transition to adulthood. In order to improve services for youth preparing to age out of foster care, it is important to identify factors that contribute to these adverse outcomes and that could become targets of further interventions. One such factor, an underdeveloped sense of autonomy, may predispose youth to poor outcomes such as limited educational attainment, unstable housing, and unemployment. At least in Western cultures that value individualism, interventions that foster the development of autonomy during adolescence could potentially improve outcomes for youth in foster care. This article aims to review factors that promote the development of autonomy and discusses the unique barriers to autonomy development faced by youth in foster care. I conclude with several intervention strategies that could facilitate the development of autonomy in foster care youth and recommendations for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) young people experience a variety of developmental trajectories that consist of milestones, the sequence and timing of which differ across individuals. They include early feelings of being different from peers, the onset of same-sex attraction, questioning one's sexuality, first same-sex sexual experience, recognition and self-labelling, disclosure to others, first romantic relationship, and self-acceptance. The invention of ‘gay youth’ during the 1970s and 1980s is briefly reviewed with an emphasis on the ways in which the portrait created by early research fails to capture the developmental trajectories of millennial young people. Although some young people struggle with mental health problems as they navigate these milestones, research documents the complexity, variety, and normative nature of the vast majority of LGB young people. A growing chorus of developmental, behavioural, and social scientists now emphasize that many contemporary young people forego sexual confusion, recognize the sex or gender to which they are attracted to and love, and believe they are as mentally healthy as heterosexual young people. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]