Early adulthood is a critical life stage for education, employment, relationship formation, and reproductive health, but young adults’ experiences in these areas are highly varied. Using averages to describe youths’ experiences may miss meaningful differences that could alter their developmental trajectories. Understanding these trajectories—and their implications for youth of varying races, ethnicities, and genders—can help researchers, practitioners, and policymakers support young people’s development and ensure greater well-being into their adulthoods. This brief summarizes findings from a new report which reveals different employment pathways taken by young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds through the use of trajectory analysis—a person-based approach that allows clustering people into meaningful patterns based on their employment earnings and the fringe benefits they receive.

The growing effort to define program, job, and credential quality requires investments in P–20W data systems to capture measures of quality and make that information transparent to the public. The National Skills Coalition will host a webinar on September 22, 2022, at 2:00 p.m. ET, which will highlight the importance of state data systems in collecting data on program, job, and credential quality, providing timely information to the public, and using data to ensure equitable attainment of quality jobs and credentials. Two states will discuss their efforts to prioritize data collection and transparent access to information.

UpSkill America — an initiative of the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program — and the Latinos and Society Program at the Aspen Institute, with support from Google.org, launched the Digital Skills and the Latino Workforce research project to better understand the challenges and opportunities that Latino workers and Latino business owners face to succeed in the digital economy. The Aspen Institute will host a webinar on September 22, 2022 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. ET during which participants will learn more about promising approaches to digital upskilling of Latino workers, students, and households implemented by organizations around the country.

The Child Welfare Information Gateway created a five-part podcast series that illustrated ways that states and tribal jurisdictions have supported kinship caregivers. Part 2 of this series focused on Washington State’s approach to providing kinship support services. Topics discussed included:

• Differences in formal and informal kinship caregivers and the differences caseworkers may have to navigate when working with each,
• Cultural considerations caseworkers and others should be aware of when working with rural and Latinx communities and families,
• The importance of building relationships across a community, not just with kinship families, and
• Implementation of one-time stipends for kinship families in Washington State.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, families endured constant and increased levels of stressors, such as job loss, illness, lack of social support, and inadequate childcare. Often, families are reported to child protection hotlines not because their children are at imminent risk of harm, but rather because of poverty-related issues such as a family’s lack of access to safe housing and other community services that support raising a child. These types of referrals to child protective services may result in an over-surveillance of families, which can compound the stresses inside the home. This report examines how hotline data are collected, analyzed, and used to put greater focus on identifying and addressing community-level causes of family stress and instability, rather than focusing primarily on child- and family-level factors.

Fathers, children, and families benefit when fathers have healthy coparenting and romantic relationships. Given the importance of healthy relationships, many fatherhood programs address coparenting and romantic relationships in programming and aim to improve skills that are applicable across different types of relationships, including communication, conflict management, and emotional self-regulation. For American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) fathers, it is important to consider the diverse cultural traditions, histories, and unique political status of Tribes as sovereign nations. The purpose of this Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief is to provide practice-based, contextually relevant strategies that fatherhood programs serving AIAN fathers can use to support their healthy coparenting and romantic relationships.

The Child Welfare Information Gateway created a five-part podcast series that illustrated ways that states and tribal jurisdictions have supported kinship caregivers. Part 1 of this series featured a group of kinship-centered services and programs from the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth, and Families. Topics discussed included:

• Why kinship caregivers should be treated differently by agencies and caseworkers, and the specific challenges kinship caregivers face,
• Strengthening relationships between caseworkers and kinship caregivers,
• The roles and responsibilities of the Rhode Island’s Family Search and Engagement team, and
• Adapting a customer-service approach across the State’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families, and what it means for caseworkers to “manage emotions first.”

This blogpost highlights a new guide from Los Angeles County that describes how community outrage over youth incarceration and overcriminalization led activists and practitioners to transform the way the legal system responds to young people in trouble with the law. The guide tells the story of community collaboration on a plan to systematically steer youth in Los Angeles County away from the legal system at the point of arrest or into community-based services in lieu of formal court processing.