Youth aging out of the foster care system face a variety of challenges, but building healthy and supportive relationships can help improve their outcomes. This Brookings Institution report highlights experiences from recent relationship-building programs targeted toward foster youth. The authors found four important lessons that researchers and policymakers can use when designing relationship-building programs for foster youth. Those lessons include the need for child welfare agencies to measure a youth’s relational capacities, designing relationship-based interventions for foster youth, tailoring services to the needs of each youth, and obtaining support from all partners involved in a foster youth’s case to reinforce relationships.

This guide from the Child Welfare Information Gateway is designed to help practitioners implement Family Group Decision-Making (FGDM). In FGDM, child welfare agencies actively engage families in developing a case plan to ensure the safety of their children. There are six elements that are critical to success in FGDM: having an independent facilitator, recognizing that the family is the key decision-making partner in the child welfare process, including private family time, prioritizing the case plan that the family develops, providing services to implement that case plan, and following up afterward until the desired outcomes have been achieved. The guide describes the challenges involved with implementing FGDM, and provides strategies and resources for overcoming those challenges.

This policy brief from the Center for Poverty Research at UC Davis highlights new research that demonstrates a connection between a parent being employed or receiving cash assistance and a higher likelihood of the parent(s) being reunified with their children after a child welfare interaction. It provides examples of how a parent may become economically disconnected once their child is removed and how this can significantly impact the chance of reunification. Suggestions for further supporting vulnerable families are given.

This article from the Journal of Public Child Welfare explores the experiences of families involved in both the child welfare and public assistance systems. The study indicated that families who lose their TANF support or who have sporadic public assistance support are less likely to be reunified with their children who have been removed. It concludes that policies that support coordination for families across systems can be beneficial economically and promote family stability and reunification.

This article highlights a study recently published by the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. The study examined income fluctuations for families using gas prices as an indicator and looked at maltreatment rates alongside these fluctuations. The article directs readers to the full text study to read more about the research.

Child abuse prevention programs have begun to focus on strengthening families to prevent abuse, as opposed to only targeting risk factors. Father involvement with children is one of these protective factors and is associated with improved child well-being. This brief from the Child & Family Research Partnership discusses the relationship between involved fathers and protective factors against abuse in families, including knowledge of parenting and connection to social supports.

In this three-part podcast series, the Child Welfare Information Gateway presents information about the importance of father involvement in the lives of children, as well as suggestions for engaging fathers and working with fatherhood organizations. In Parts 1 and 2, leaders from fatherhood organizations share some benefits of father involvement, tips for locating local noncustodial fathers, and insights into the perspective of fathers. In Part 3, a partnership between a child welfare agency and fatherhood program in South Carolina is discussed.

In the United States, child welfare systems encounter many vulnerable children and their families each year. This report from the Center on the Developing Child examines how new science on child development can be applied to policies and practices to enhance child welfare systems, thereby improving outcomes for children and their families.

The U.S. incarceration rate remains exceptionally high, especially for socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, and the incidence of involvement in child protective services (CPS) is also quite high among disadvantaged groups. This confluence of incarceration and CPS involvement may have various impacts for parents, children, and families as a whole. The authors of this Institute for Research on Poverty brief examined data from Wisconsin to demonstrate and describe the overlap between parental incarceration and child CPS involvement, as well as between adolescent CPS involvement and later incarceration in young adulthood.