Homeless families struggle with a variety of structural and psychosocial issues, including severe poverty, unemployment, and exposure to interpersonal violence and trauma. Historically, the full range of homeless families’ needs has not been routinely assessed. The Assessment Checklist for Homeless Family Providers was created by the Bassuk Center to address this situation and assist service providers in conducting comprehensive, evidence-based assessments of the families they serve. The checklist covers the following eight domains that have been proven to be relevant to the care of homeless families: family demographics, immediate safety needs, housing and homelessness, self-sufficiency, service use, parent functioning, child development, and use of standardized screening instruments.

This brief from the Family Welfare Research & Training Group profiles cash assistance cases in Maryland that were designated as “child under one cases” and eligible for the federal Age of Youngest Child (AYC) exemption, which permits single parents to abstain from work requirements for up to 12 months while caring for an infant. Overall, the clients from these cases were substantially younger than the typical cash assistance client in Maryland, many of them were new to the cash assistance program, just over half had been employed before receiving benefits, and the typical parent only used the exemption for 7 months.

There is an urgent need for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants to secure the education and training required to transition to economic self-sufficiency. The majority of jobs in the future will require at least some education beyond high school, yet many SNAP participants have not reached this level of educational attainment. Without the skills to meet rapidly changing labor market demand, the chances of these SNAP participants getting a good job and reducing their need for SNAP are extremely low. The SNAP Employment & Training (SNAP E&T) program, a skills and job training program for SNAP participants administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), is a key resource that States and their partners can use to help SNAP participants gain skills for higher paying jobs. This USDA Policy Brief presents evidence for the usefulness of SNAP E&T and why States should seriously consider building their own SNAP E&T programs.

The resources and services available through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program are critical to ending family homelessness. State and local TANF programs can provide access to critical work opportunities and support services for families experiencing homelessness. This resource from the Heartland Alliance provides an overview of TANF, examples of where state and local TANF programs have been leveraged to support homeless families, and recommendations to ensure that TANF resources are leveraged effectively to support homeless families.

Conditional cash transfer programs offer cash assistance to low-income families to reduce immediate hardship, but base this assistance on actions such as investing in children’s educational achievement and family preventive health care, in the hope of improving children’s longer-term success. Evaluations of these programs have found some important successes in reducing poverty and increasing investments in children. Opportunity NYC – Family Rewards is the first comprehensive conditional cash transfer program to be implemented and evaluated in a higher-income country. This article from the Institute for Research on Poverty summarizes a study that looked at whether and how school quality affected Family Rewards program effects on high school students’ educational processes and achievement. This study considers the role of school context in examining the results of a conditional cash transfer program on educational outcomes, and uses an expanded set of outcomes that include children’s approaches to schooling, parental investment in their children, and academic achievement.

The federal child support program collects billions of dollars per year in child support payments and serves more than 16 million children and families. However, about 35 percent of child support obligations go unpaid each month and most child support debt is held by people with very little or no reported income. Although many child support agencies offer services to help parents find a job or lower their payments, not all parents are aware of these services and do not enroll or apply for them. Behavioral science research indicates that providing information in simpler forms, rather than dense legal packets, can improve understanding of agency processes and services and better encourage customers to take full advantage of available services. The Administration for Children and Families has been conducting projects to explore the potential of behaviorally informed interventions to improve child support outcomes. This report from MDRC provides information on these projects. Early indications are that behaviorally informed communications in Texas and Washington led to an increase in order modification requests from noncustodial parents who were incarcerated, and a change in how reminder notices were sent to noncustodial parents in two Ohio counties led to an increase in the number of child support payments.

Nearly half of young children in the United States are growing up in low-income families. There are 10 million low-income families with children age 8 and under in which parents have limited skills, low wages, and inflexible work schedules. The two generation (two-gen) approach suggests that children succeed when parents succeed, and vice versa. CAP Tulsa and Garrett County Community Action Committee have been implementing two-gen strategies designed to promote stability and vitality for families by addressing the needs of children and parents together. This brief provides an overview of those strategies and identifies lessons learned from each program.

Previously known as “vocational education,” career and technical education (CTE) has emerged in the past decade as one of the most promising approaches to preparing students for the future. New York City is at the forefront of the national revolution in career education, with 50 of the city’s schools dedicated exclusively to CTE and others providing opportunities to concentrate in a CTE subject area. This report from the Manhattan Institute presents data suggesting that young people who attend CTE schools have better attendance rates and are more likely to graduate. The report concluded that continued program innovation, greater resource investment, and stronger collaboration with business and industry are necessary to build on the CTE movement’s initial success.

This brief from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) presents information from a multi-site study of the impact of incarceration on father-child relationships. The findings indicate that fewer fathers lived with or financially supported their children after release than before incarceration. Fathers who had more contact with their children during incarceration were more likely to live with their children after release, as were fathers who had happier relationships with their children’s mothers. Also, fathers of younger children reported higher parental warmth and better relationship quality with their children than fathers of older children.

This report from the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation provides a nationally representative estimate of all home-based care to children ages birth through five years and not yet in kindergarten as of 2012, using data from the National Survey of Early Care and Education. The report describes the characteristics of the providers and the care they provide.