Nearly 12% of American children will spend at least half of their lives from birth to age 17 living in poverty. This report from the Urban Institute analyzes factors that have helped these persistently poor children achieve economic success. Some of those factors include spending more years in an employed family, spending fewer years in a family headed by someone with a disability, and living in less segregated and disadvantaged neighborhoods. The researchers recommend several strategies to help more persistently poor children achieve economic success, such as subsidized employment for parents and programs to help families move out of disadvantaged neighborhoods.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation hosted this webinar in October 2016; the webinar recording is available online. The webinar is part of a series discussing lessons learned from the Foundation’s Learn and Earn to Achieve Potential (LEAP) initiative, which is working with youth, especially those who have been justice system involved, homeless, or in the child welfare system, to address the challenges that make it difficult for them to achieve degrees or maintain jobs. LEAP sites have aimed to make their services responsive to youth who have experienced trauma, since research shows that suffering extreme stress and adverse experiences in childhood can impair physical development in ways that have long-term consequences. On the webinar, three LEAP sites discussed how they have made their services trauma-responsive.

This post from the Chronicle of Evidence-Based Mentoring is part of a series on toxic stress. In this post, the authors highlight what professional staff need to know about toxic stress to best serve vulnerable youth and families.

Some aspects of child development are often misconstrued. This brief from the Harvard Center on the Developing Child examines these aspects and clarifies their meaning and importance. For example, even infants are adversely affected when significant stresses occur in their family environment.

Adverse experiences in childhood can produce physiological changes in the brain, which can ultimately negatively affect a child’s long-term decision-making skills and ability to regulate emotions. The Annie E. Casey Foundation hosted a webinar that presented practical tools and solutions for integrating trauma-responsive practices into youth programs.

This report is the fourth and final in a series on Self-Regulation and Toxic Stress; it is targeted specifically towards program administrators and practitioners. This report reviews the key concepts for understanding self-regulation, including the relationship between stress and self-regulation. Additionally, it summarizes principal findings from a comprehensive review of self-regulation interventions. Finally and most importantly, it addresses how current theory and knowledge of self-regulation may apply to programs and practitioners serving children and youth in different developmental groups from birth through young adulthood.

Key conclusions from the report indicate that:

• A variety of self-regulation interventions result in meaningful positive effects on cognitive, emotional, and behavioral self-regulation, as well as broader outcomes across development in functional domains like mental health and academic achievement.
• Many promising intervention approaches exist for supporting self-regulation development that could be incorporated into existing ACF programs.
• Care is needed in selecting interventions that may be a good “fit” for relevant populations and settings.
• Given the profound impacts that self-regulation can have across areas of functioning into adulthood, a self-regulation framework to support the well-being of children and families living in adversity may have great value. (Author abstract)

The Children’s Institute, Inc. (CII), located in Los Angeles, California, combines clinical mental health and other supports to serve children and families affected by trauma. This report from MDRC presents findings from an evaluation of CII’s service model and delivery of evidence-based practices.

Recent studies have begun to show that inhibited brain development and functioning in children raised in poverty may be an important explanatory factor behind the relationship often seen between growing up in poverty and lower educational attainment. This brief from the Institute for Research on Poverty summarizes an April 2016 workshop, hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where researchers in the area of poverty and developmental neuroscience discussed the current status of the research and how it can be appropriately and effectively used to inform public policy.