Parents, extended family, and communities are all responsible for promoting children’s well-being and protecting them from trauma. When children cannot remain safely with their parents, child welfare experts view kinship foster care as a best practice and seek opportunities to promote a “kin first” approach. This Chapin Hall policy brief identifies how kinship families form, details evidence of how kinship diversion programs operate, and offers policy and practice recommendations on how to explore, make meaning of, and implement changes to child welfare agencies’ kinship diversion practices.

Working with previously untapped community partners helps kinship-serving agencies to better empower and sustain kinship families. The Grandfamilies & Kinship Support Network will host a webinar on June 13, 2023 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. ET featuring a panel representing national organizations, including Family Resource Centers, that have local programming in communities across the country. Speakers will share how and why they began supporting kinship families and provide strategies for approaching untapped collaborators and working with them to serve local communities.

Child poverty is associated with both short- and long-term health and well-being. Poverty affects child health directly through the experience of deprivation, such as through food insufficiency or lack of housing, but also indirectly through the availability of parental or community resources. Economic resources also shape children's access to health-promoting policies, like education, child care, parental leave, and health care, which affect both current and later-life health and mortality. Many income support policies also reduce poverty and improve economic well-being, which in turn improves child health. This free open access article reviews the evidence on income support policies in the United States and their effects on child health. This paper is not an exhaustive literature review but paints a broad picture of findings related to income support and child health. It also outlines policy considerations and areas where additional research is needed to understand how income support and poverty reduction might best support child health.

Youth Thrive, a research-informed framework on youth well-being and an action-oriented initiative of the Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP), is designed to better support healthy development and promote well-being for youth with partners across the country. For the past eight years, Youth Thrive has focused on strategies to improve systems that serve youth who are most marginalized in society, specifically focusing on child welfare and juvenile justice systems and the service system that supports youth who are at-risk of homelessness. CSSP will host a webinar on June 8, 2023 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET to discuss new resources from Youth Thrive which organizations can use to help young people build their protective and promotive factors. Participants will learn about resources such as new graphics and animated videos, a practice blueprint with many tools and guides, an interactive professional development workshop for staff on social connections, and an instructional video on the Youth Thrive Self-Assessment Survey.

This comprehensive child welfare resource provides state and national data on child maltreatment, foster care, kinship caregiving, permanency, and older youth in care. The data are essential to help policymakers understand how many children and youth come in contact with the child welfare system, and why. States can use this information to ensure that their child welfare systems support the safety, stability, and well-being of all families in their state.

Due in part to structural socioeconomic inequality, children from families with lower incomes may be at particularly high risk of abuse, neglect, and behavioral problems during infancy, toddlerhood, and early childhood. Research has found that home visiting programs for families with young children can improve children’s development and strengthen caregivers’ and families’ well-being. However, the COVID-19 pandemic created numerous challenges for home visiting programs, forcing them to deliver services online or in a hybrid format and to adapt their program models’ content to respond to pandemic-related challenges. One evidence-based home visiting program, Child First, provides a psychotherapeutic, parent-child intervention embedded in a coordinated system of care. This working paper highlights the 12-month impacts found in a study of Child First implemented in Connecticut and North Carolina.

Those with lived experience in child welfare have a unique, firsthand perspective on issues that can inform partnerships, policies, and solutions that best meet the needs of children and families. Child welfare agencies and organizations should prioritize collaborating with individuals who have lived experience to gain a better understanding of how people are affected by the social issue. This podcast features a panel discussion from the 2022 Child Welfare Virtual Expo. Topics discussed included actionable ways to engage in authentic, nonexploitative storytelling endeavors with those with lived expertise, and strategies to authentically engage people with lived experience and mitigate harm.

Families affected by substance use disorders and involved in the child welfare system face a variety of complex challenges. Children of parents with substance use disorder are more likely to be removed from parental care, less likely to be reunified, and experience lengthier out-of-home placements and delayed permanency. This brief provides an overview of the Sobriety Treatment and Recovery Teams (START) program — an evidence-based child welfare service delivery model for families that is aimed at keeping children safely with their parent(s) whenever possible through achieving parental sobriety and recovery, and family stability. The brief also highlights the funding and implementation of the START model in Kansas, Kentucky (which uses TANF to support the model), North Carolina, and Ohio, along with each state’s unique considerations.

The Child Welfare Information Gateway created a five-part podcast series that illustrated ways that states and tribal jurisdictions have supported kinship caregivers. Part 5 of this series explores a series of changes within New Mexico’s Children, Youth, and Families Department (CYFD) to improve the engagement and support of kinship families. These changes include internal workforce shifts, such as changes in supervisory practices and internal communications to improve how relatives and caregivers are viewed; programs to keep families engaged and involved in children’s lives even if they are unable to serve as primary caregivers; and streamlining the licensing process to be less invasive and more supportive of families facing the abrupt changes and challenges of raising children.

Topics discussed include:

• Which methods increase involvement of other, non-caregiver kin and families in children’s lives and build strength and support caregivers,
• How CYFD changed caseworkers’ and staff perception to improve how relatives and kinship families are viewed and supported within the child welfare system,
• How direct feedback from community organizations and families improved how CYFD delivers services and supports families, and
• How processes and policies changed to make CYFD more “family-friendly.”