This comprehensive child welfare resource provides state and national data on child maltreatment, foster care, kinship caregiving, and adoption from foster care. Data profiles are available by state. Also available for download is a companion guide which explains how stakeholders can interpret and use the data.

Fathers have encountered challenges that may affect their romantic and coparenting relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic. These include increased unemployment, issues around child access and visitation, and difficulties navigating work-from-home arrangements. COVID-19 also created unique hurdles for fatherhood programs in providing services to fathers, and many of these programs were required to swiftly shift from in-person to virtual service delivery. This brief describes how COVID-19 affected fathers’ relationships and healthy relationship programming provided by fatherhood programs and offers strategies that these programs can adopt to better support fathers’ coparenting and romantic relationships.

The COVID-19 pandemic created sudden and substantial hardships for many families with low incomes and also created unprecedented challenges for the operation of benefit programs. States were able to use the TANF program’s existing flexibility to modify their policies if they felt such changes would better support families. This brief provides a graphical overview of selected TANF policy changes states made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It includes information about changes to work and activity requirements, sanctions, time limits, and treatment of unemployment insurance benefits.

Providing access to tangible resources can strengthen families and communities by avoiding and de-escalating crises, reducing parental stress, increasing access to safe housing and reliable childcare, and ensuring children have the material items they need to thrive. This brief discusses the impact of community-based strategies, connections, and collaborations that offer economic supports to address families’ basic needs, keeping children safe and families together. These include housing supports, food assistance, financial supports, employment assistance, early care and education services, legal services, and medical and behavioral health care.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs for youth aim to improve young people’s understanding of romantic relationships and prepare them to have healthy romantic relationships in adolescence and adulthood. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief summarizes the impact literature on these programs. The brief describes HMRE programs for youth, including the types of services they offer, how they are structured, the populations they serve, and their effectiveness.

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Mathematica, and The Adjacent Possible will jointly host a webinar on March 14, 2022 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:15 p.m. ET to highlight innovative strategies used by state and local TANF programs during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic to adapt service delivery and promote staff and client well-being. Speakers will share the findings of two briefs published by Project SPARK (Supporting Partnerships to Advance Research and Knowledge). The webinar will be interactive with two primary purposes for participants: engage in a sense-making exercise with the research themes, and explore ways of applying and experimenting with the innovations.

The child welfare-to-prison pipeline describes the systems that funnel youth from the child welfare system into the juvenile justice system. The child welfare system often targets and disproportionately surveils black and brown families—largely those living in poverty and dealing with the challenges of mental health, substance use, and over-policing by the criminal legal system. The National Association of Counsel for Children (NACC) will host a webinar on March 22, 2022 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. ET. Speakers will stress the importance of strengthening community resources and preventing family disintegration as a tool to end the child welfare-to-prison pipeline. There is a registration fee for non-NACC members to attend this webinar.

The Administration for Children and Families will host a webinar on March 14, 2022 from 2:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET which will discuss approaches to supporting, growing, and strengthening the early childhood workforce in tribal communities. Tribal communities seek to ensure that early childhood program staff have the language, cultural, and community knowledge to implement culturally grounded programs that meet the needs of American Indian/Alaska Native children and families. They also have a strong interest in “growing their own” workforce by supporting members of the community, including former program participants, to become early childhood professionals. In the webinar, participants will hear an overview of issues related to supporting and strengthening the early childhood workforce in tribal communities, followed by a panel highlighting innovations and promising practices. Additionally, participants will be able to learn more about and discuss highlighted strategies with peers and hear about resources they can use in their own communities.

This playbook, developed in collaboration between the National Community Action Partnership and the American Public Human Services Association, explores how Community Action and human services agencies partnered together in response to the COVID-19 public health and economic crisis. It presents opportunities for alignment in providing whole family supports, making career pathways possible for SNAP recipients, and tackling structural inequities in accessing services. Examples of these alignments include western Maryland and Virginia (whole family supports), Minnesota and Oregon (SNAP Employment & Training), and rural Ohio and Montgomery County, Maryland (dismantling structural inequities).

Failing to practice self-care habits contributes to the stress caregivers feel and the problems they may experience with their own physical, mental, and emotional health. The likely outcome or consequence for a caregiver who is not taking care of him- or herself is burnout. This blogpost identifies causes of caregiver burnout, how these factors contribute to negative feelings, and how burnout can manifest itself in various ways.