This blogpost summarizes two articles by Annie E. Casey Foundation staffers who focus on two critical facets for youth in foster care. The first article explores adolescent brain science and how child welfare professionals can support and engage these youth in planning their futures. The second article covers entry prevention programs and how they keep families together and reduce removal in cases other than child neglect or abuse.

This brief describes a project highlighting the development and implementation of policies and practices aimed at reducing the impact of Illinois mothers’ incarceration on their children. From interviews with incarcerated mothers, researchers learned how incarceration creates barriers to parenting, and through interviews with program administrators and others, they discovered how programs across the U.S. are addressing these barriers. Ways to help incarcerated mothers maintain relationships with their children included supporting communication between mothers and children via mail or phone, improving visitation policies, and increasing support services’ availability.

This blogpost profiles the Louisiana Department of Child and Family Services’ efforts to connect birth families with resource families following child removal, with the hopes of improving child welfare and the likelihood and timeliness of reunification. This shared parenting reflects the Quality Parenting Initiative (QPI), a Youth Law Center strategy to pave a new approach toward increasing reunification outcomes for families. This approach calls for a fundamental culture shift away from an “us-them” adversarial relationship between birth and resource families.

This brief identifies challenges for addressing families in rural areas who fall within the child welfare system and who also encounter substance misuse. It also illustrates several challenges that include a lack of family-centered options as well as transportation and technological limitations in addressing the needs of parents with substance abuse. The brief also points out the need for collaboration in rural areas between child welfare agencies and substance use treatment providers.

This Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set of resources identifies three case studies of how states have utilized research on adverse childhood experiences to inform child abuse and neglect prevention. The case studies reflect research to practice implications for service delivery in Alaska, Oklahoma, Washington State, and Wisconsin.

More than one-quarter of maltreatment victims are under the age of 3, and these children often encounter additional trauma due to their family’s interaction with the child welfare system; this involvement can involve separations from the family and placements. According to research, these types of separations can result in lifelong trauma. This strategy brief describes the Safe Babies Court Team™ (SBCT) approach, which strives to minimize trauma when court involvement is needed by improving the collaboration of the courts, child welfare agencies, and other organizations in supporting young children and their families. SBCT involves meetings of both family and community court teams. The brief includes SBCT’s key components, key success factors, and an example of how the SBCT approach has impacted Florida.

The Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management developed and launched this database, which is an updated index of 29 neighborhood-level indicators pointing to opportunities for child well-being in about 72,000 neighborhoods. The indicators reflect three data components: education, health and environment, and social and economic domains. The education component reflects access to quality early childhood education, quality of elementary and secondary schools, and educational supports. The health and environment domain covers access to healthy food and green space as well as exposure to industrial pollutants. The social and economic data captures indicators that measure access to employment and family economic resources.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation issue brief examines how two agencies, Alameda County, California and the Colorado Department of Human Services use continuous quality improvement (CQI) in implementing their programs that address youth at risk of homelessness. CQI is a process-oriented evaluation that supports the enhancement of programs and practices through ongoing collection analysis of real-time data to identify and test changes in program implementation. Key components of this brief look at the CQI process design features at these two agencies, how the CQI process affected the operation of the agency’s interventions to prevent homelessness among youth and young adults who have been involved in the child welfare system, and what advice the two agencies have for other entities that may use CQI in their program reviews.

The Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison will host a webinar on February 19, 2020 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. CT to discuss ways that a father’s health and behaviors impact their children’s well-being. Researchers will present findings about fathers’ experiences in prenatal and pediatric care settings and strategies for promoting fathers’ physical and mental health; also presented will be findings on how to support fathers in modeling positive health behaviors for their children.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation report presents findings from the Building Bridges and Bonds (B3) study. The B3 study covered approaches addressing parenting and economic stability within Responsible Fatherhood (RF) grant programs, and examined the impact of one particular intervention – Just Beginning (JB). It also detailed how three RF grantees implemented JB within their existing set of supportive services.