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Strengthening Families Blog

More Data On Children and the “Great Recession”

Back on June 28, Strengthening Families blogged about trend data showing declines in child well-being at the start of the economic downturn. Since then, two new reports are out that offer some good news mixed with the bad: nationally, teen births and child abuse rates are down, children’s health insurance coverage is up, and eight graders’ math and reading scores increased. But economic security indicators continue their downward trend. Most alarmingly, thenpercentage of children living in food insecure homes rose to its highest level since 1995.

America’s Children In Brief: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2010 is the federal government’s annual statistical report on child and youth indicators between 2007 to 2009. Of significance,

• The drop in adolescent births in 2008 occurred after two years of increases between 2005 and 2007. It remains to be seen if this means a return to the steady declines seen earlier in this decade, or is a blip in the more recent upward trend.
• Between 2007 and 2008, the percentage of children from birth to 17 years of age living in food insecure homes rose from 17 percent to 22 percent, the highest prevalence since monitoring began. At the same time, the percentage of children living with at least one parent employed year round full time dropped from 77 percent to 75 percent, and the proportion of related children living in poverty rose from 18 percent to 19 percent.

Updated Trends in Child Maltreatment, 2008, a new report from the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, finds that rates of substantiated child maltreatment cases declined nationally in 2008 compared to 2007, continuing a large downward trend over the last 15 years. Specifically,

• Sexual abuse declined 6 percent, physical abuse 3 percent and neglect 2 percent.
• Child maltreatment fatalities stayed stable from 2007 to 2008.

What’s interesting is that 2008 marked the first full year of the current recession, and economic downturns are generally thought to be associated with increased family stress and child maltreatment. Lead Author David Finkelhor suggests that, “the long-improvement for sexual and physical abuse may be related to a generation-long effort to educate and respond more effectively and aggressively to the problem. If successful prevention efforts are behind the declines, then the improvements may persist even in the face of social stressors like the recession.” However, Finkelhor cautions, “it could be that discouragement and despair in families about their deteriorating economic situation take longer than a year to show their effects.”

The report was based on an analysis of data on substantiated child maltreatment cases submitted by state child protection agencies to the federal government. Bear in mind that individual states may have trends quite different from the national trends, specially in the short run.

Extensive research supports the common-sense notion that when Protective Factors, including Concrete Support in Times of Need, are present and robust in a family, the likelihood of child abuse and neglect diminish. As we wrote earlier, as more and more families struggle with a scarcity of resources in this recesssion, formal and informal systes of support that fill in the gaps are more important than ever. By intentionally focusing on building Protective Factors for families the people that surround children and families can minimize the stress and insecurity they face and mitigate their potentially negative impacts on children. Strengthening Families offers many low-cost and no-cost strategies to build Protective Factors with families of young children that can be implemented in a broad spectrum of settings and supported by smart policies at the local, state, and federal levels.

We will all be intereseted to see what the data tells us about child-well being in the later years of the economic downturn. Keep following the Strengthening Families blog for important updates and check out related policy research, data, and guidance at Policy for Results, an on-line tool for state policymakers from the Center for the Study of Social Policy. See especially the goals for Reducing Teen Pregnancy, Reducing Reducing Child Poverty, and the section on Strategies for Tough Fiscal Times. And coming soon, recommendations for Reducing Child Abuse and Neglect.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Josephers under Creative Commons license.

Transitions for CSSP’s Strengthening Families Team

As the Strengthening Families National Network moves into the next phase of implementation, our SF team at the Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP) is undergoing some transitions of its own. Kate Stepleton, whom many of you have come to know over the last three years, will be leaving CSSP to take on a new challenge: working with Commissioner Bryan H. Samuels at the Administration of Children, Youth, and Families (USDHHS, ACF). While we are sorry to see her go, we are thrilled for her to have this opportunity. We are grateful for all the hard work she has done for Strengthening Families during her time at CSSP.

”It’s been an honor and a pleasure to work with you over the last three years. You’ve taught me so much, and I will bring all of it with me to the Commissioner’s office. I look forward to running into SFNN members in my work to strengthen families in my new role at ACYF.” --Kate Stepleton

We would also like to introduce you to two new members of our team who will be working with us. Anna Lovejoy is a consultant specializing in policy affecting children birth to age five and their families. She has previously served as the Early Childhood Program Director at the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and a Legislative Analyst for the American Public Human Services Association. Amy Foster joins us as an intern from the Erikson Institute in Chicago. Prior to embarking on her Masters Degree in Child Development, she worked through the child care resource and referral agencies to implement Strengthening Families in Kansas. We are excited to have Anna and Amy on our team, and we hope you will join us in welcoming them.

Strengthening Families National Network Participates in Early Childhood 2010

Earlier this month the federal Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Education (ED) convened a historic meeting called Early Childhood 2010.  The meeting was an important step in a growing and evolving partnership between the two departments to lift up importance of early childhood as an important foundation for the rest of life.  Secretaries Kathleen Sebelius (HHS) and Arnie Duncan (ED) announced a new early childhood interagency council. Participants included federal staff, state leads from a variety of early childhood programs funded by the two departments, and innovators and leaders from around the country. 

The work of Strengthening Families was well represented in the meeting.  Nilofer Ahsan participated in the interagency group responsible for planning the meeting. Strengthening Families Our director, Judy Langford, facilitated a workshop where Jack Miller from the Massachusetts Children’s Trust Fund and Roger Sherman from Idaho’s Trust Fund talked about how they are using the Strengthening Families framework to coordinate across agencies. Judy also presented Strengthening Families as an approach to meeting the needs of diverse families in times of stress, following a presentation by Harvard’s Hiro Yoshikawa on his research describing some of the current challenges for families.  Robin Higa of the National Alliance of Children’s Trust Funds and Lina Cramer of Strengthening Families Illinois led workshops where participants learned more about community cafes and parent cafes.  National Partner organizations were present and active in the meeting as presenters in a variety of sessions.  Strengthening Families staff also facilitated or took notes for a variety of state team meetings where we heard our work being well represented in states early childhood agendas. Representatives from over twenty SFNN states came together to celebrate our work together and talk about what’s next for Strengthening Families. 

Finally, the new Administration for Children, Youth and Families Commissioner, Bryan Samuels, talked about the importance and relevance of the Strengthening Families approach to the entire span of the work of ACYF, including teen parents, domestic violence and runaway youth, in the keynote address he gave at an adjunct meeting for Community-Based Child Abuse Prevention (CBCAP) Program leads. During the CBCAP grantee meeting, Quality Improvement Center on Early Childhood grantees had an opportunity for extended orientation to the protective factors research and history of Strengthening Families as the foundation for their research projects, presented by Judy Langford along with Charlyn Harper Browne, Teresa Rafael (National Alliance of Children’s Trust and Prevention Funds), and Nancy Seibel (ZERO TO THREE).  In a provocative session on racial disproportionality in the child welfare system that included Carol Johnson, Child Welfare leader from Minnesota and Kristen Weber from CSSP, Judy discussed the use of Strengthening Families approach to responding to all families as a way to prevent children from coming into the system in the first place.
 
We thank everyone who participated, and the federal agencies for hosting this important event.

New from Strengthening Families! Allied for Better Outcomes: Child Welfare and Early Childhood

We are pleased to announce the release of our new paper, Allied for Better Outcomes: Child Welfare and Early Childhood.  In it, we make the case for linking early childhood and child welfare systems and applying the Strengthening Families™ approach to child welfare practice. This approach emphasizes attention to the presence and promotion of evidence-based protective factors—as well as the reduction of risk factors—to guide caseworkers and their partners in child welfare in ensuring the healthy development of young children. 

The paper includes a brief review of the Protective Factors literature and proposes that early interventions (notably early care and education (ECE) programs), are a resource readily available to child welfare agencies and the families they serve. Allied for Better Outcomes and its accompanying materials also

• Offer guiding principles, goals, and strategies for adopting this approach
• Highlight best practices and lessons learned states and systems that have worked to incorporate this approach into their practice, including case studies of Illinois, New Jersey and Wisconsin
• Look ahead to the results that may be achieved for young children, their families, and their communities if the child welfare system and its partners mobilize to improve their well-being by promoting Protective Factors

U.S. Global Competitiveness Starts with Early Education

Last week on Capitol Hill, the College Board Advocacy and Policy Center unveiled 10 recommendations to address the “alarming education deficit” that threatens the nation’s global competitiveness and economic future and reposition the U.S. once again as the world leader in education. The goal is to ensure that 55 percent of Americans will hold a postsecondary degree by 2025.

Their first recommendation? That states provide a program of voluntary preschool education, universally available to children from low-income families (those at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty line).  The indicators by which the College Board will measure progress toward this recommendation track enrollment of three- to five-year-olds in prekindergarten and Head Start programs.

Despite this narrow focus, the accompanying State Policy Guide (Recommendation 1: Early Childhood, PDF) recognizes that “prekindergarten alone will not ensure that the children who are most developmentally at risk will be ready for school and higher education.” The co-authors from the College Board and the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) rightly state that, “a system that supports children from birth to age five must be strategically tailored around different populations of children and parents.” They list high quality child care, home visiting, early intervention, mental health, and environmental threat prevention efforts as investments that also make an impact.

No doubt informed by NCSL’s work with the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University and the Birth to Five Policy Alliance, the policy guide offers a solid overview of why the early years matter and what states can do. Written primarily through the lens of early care and education policy, it illustrates a range of low-, medium-, and high-cost policy approaches and recommends 13 actions which legislators can take immediately and over the long term to lead on this issue.

See the College Board’s College Completion Agenda site for more on all 10 recommendations, indicators, and interactive data tools that allow information to be easily accessed and customized by and across states.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Gideon Tsang under Creative Commons license.