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Ensuring child and family well-being requires a radically different, anti-racist response of supports that center the voices of diverse children and families of color, are dignified and strengths-based, and that are offered in spaces they trust. As this brief highlights, community-based organizations across the U.S. are striving to answer that call despite numerous barriers. This brief lifts up the voices of those community providers, with the goal of highlighting and addressing the barriers that stand in the way of all families having the support they need.
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ABSTRACT
The child welfare system is overdue for substantial transformation. Families and communities of color have experienced the brunt of the failings and limitations present in current policy and practice. A transformed approach is needed that prioritizes maltreatment prevention, racial equity, and child and family well-being. The Family First Prevention Services Act is an important step in this effort, although its scope falls short of the significant changes that are needed to effectively serve children and families. Transformation requires intentional efforts to disentangle poverty…
Pregnancy through age three is the most critical period for children’s development. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic has battered working parents of young children, with what are likely to be significant and long-lasting negative consequences. In this brief, the authors propose a set of enhanced Infant-Toddler policies—in the areas of income support, child care, and paid family leave—to better support these families and improve their children’s long-term health and wellbeing.
This paper asks the questions: What can we learn from the pandemic—and federal, state, and local governmental responses— about the cracks in the child welfare system? What lessons can be carried forward post-pandemic? It presents recommendations for protecting children through the pandemic and beyond.
"While Pennsylvania has made great strides in ensuring family preservation, placement with kin and the maintenance of kinship connections, there is an opportunity to identify strategies to increase these outcomes and become a national leader in putting families first," this report argues. The paper outlines concrete policy solutions that "can improve this trajectory, making Pennsylvania a model for other states [in the U.S.]."
Summary
This KIDS COUNT policy report examines how households with children are faring during the pandemic. Its findings are primarily based on surveys conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused widespread economic damage and isolated families in unprecedented ways. Parents have had to juggle both educating and caring for their children and millions of Americans have lost not just their jobs, but their sense stability, source of income and health care.
To succeed now and after the pandemic, families must have good health, both physical and mental…
Children with medical complexity (CMC) generally require intensive family support and high-cost health care services – needs that may lead to out-of-home placement when they are not available or affordable. The Family First Prevention Services Act of 2018 offers resources to transform state foster care systems to emphasize prevention – and when necessary placement in a foster care home rather than an institution. CMC could benefit if states applied its goals to improve foster care prevention and placement options for CMC. Medicaid and Title V services also can help keep CMC at home. This…
The COVID-19 pandemic demands federal action that includes protecting and promoting the well being of all families now, and into the future—especially for immigrant families. This brief explores how policymakers can begin to build a comprehensive and inclusive system of supports to protect immigrant families.
Abstract
As this paper was being written, school systems across the country were increasingly announcing plans for full or partial distance learning to respond to COVID-19, and it seems likely that more school systems may implement these plans should the pandemic surge in the fall or winter. As a result, working parents with school-age children are faced with the challenge of how to ensure that their children are in a safe learning setting while they work—a challenge that is even more daunting for families with low incomes, families who face greater health risks, and families who face…
ABSTRACT
Foster care provides round-the-clock substitute care for nearly 700,000 U.S. children who are temporarily or permanently separated from their family of origin each year. Each state manages its own foster care system according to federal regulations. Despite numerous large-scale federal policy reforms over the past several decades, substantial concerns remain about the experiences and outcomes of children in the foster care system. The most recent effort to reform foster care, the Family First Prevention Services Act of 2018, attempts to both reduce the use of foster care and…