Addressing childhood poverty poses a significant and multifaceted challenge, and is particularly pronounced in Puerto Rico, where high rates of poverty intertwine with systemic factors to contribute to elevated rates of underemployment and food insecurity. Two-generation (2Gen) approaches aim to address these complex challenges by recognizing the interconnectedness of family dynamics, neighborhood contexts, and child outcomes. This Urban Institute report is accompanied with an executive summary that assesses the effectiveness of Vimenti, an integrated service center and school for families in Puerto Rico that provides a variety of family services using a 2Gen approach.

States, counties, and tribes are modernizing their child support programs through holistic, family-centered policies and practices that build partnerships with parents instead of adversarial relationships. They go beyond collecting money to address underlying reasons for nonpayment, ensure that children benefit from payments, and facilitate effective co-parenting. Family-centered child support policies put children where they belong: at the center of child support policymaking. The Centering Child Well-Being in Child Support Policy toolkit, developed by Ascend at Aspen Institute, features new analysis of state child support director survey data. The toolkit offers innovations on: 

1. Family Distribution,
2. Reducing Arrears,
3. Right-Sizing Orders,
4. Income Supports,
5. Supporting Healthy Co-Parenting, and 
6. Providing Equal Access to Justice.

In January 2021, Ascend at the Aspen Institute launched the Two-Generation Prenatal-to-Three Learning and Action Community (2GP3 LAC). The 2GP3 LAC set out to reimagine the child welfare field’s approach to child protection to reflect a preventive, strengths-based, whole-family orientation by drawing on provisions of the Family First Prevention Services Act and local, state, and tribal efforts to more effectively align early childhood and health funding, systems, and services. This recording from the 2023 Ascend Forum includes the 2GP3 LAC researchers and their lessons for centering prevention and upstream solutions in systems of care for families. This recording is accompanied by their report, ‘Reimaging Child Welfare: A Networked Approach to Family Well-Being.’

Programs, organizations, and systems that provide services to address parents' and caregivers' needs (such as education and job-training services, substance use treatment centers, parent education programs, and others) often work exclusively with the adults, while those that serve the needs of children (such as schools and child care centers) often do not focus on advancing the well-being of the caregivers or other adults in their lives. Two-generation (2Gen) approaches bridge this gap by serving children and their families together through integrated and simultaneous services, with a particular focus on helping families achieve lasting financial stability. This Child Welfare Information Gateway brief provides an overview of 2Gen approaches and why child welfare agencies should use them to improve outcomes for the families they serve. The brief also describes the five core 2Gen approaches to help build parental capacity and protective factors within families, often with the explicit goal of interrupting generational cycles of poverty.

The purpose of the Next Steps for Rigorous Research on Two-Generation Approaches (NS2G) project was to build the evidence base for two-generation approaches. Two-generation initiatives combine economic security services for parents with accessible, high quality early care and education for children, and hold promise for improving family well-being. In this recording, co-hosted by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation and Ascend at the Aspen Institute, NS2G team members describe the work that two-generation initiatives conducted to strengthen approaches to intentionally coordinating services for caregivers and their children. Presenters shared tools and techniques that can be used by other two-generation initiatives to strengthen their approaches.

Children living in families with low incomes face an array of challenges that place them at much higher risk of experiencing poverty in adulthood as compared with other children. This cycle of intergenerational poverty poses an economic disadvantage to not only the children and their families but also the nation. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) will host a webinar on September 21, 2023 from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. ET on the NASEM report entitled Reducing Intergenerational Poverty that examines the drivers of long-term, intergenerational poverty, identifies potential policies and programs to reduce it, addresses gaps in data and research, and highlights the disproportionate effect of disadvantage to different racial/ethnic groups. The webinar will include a discussion of the report's key findings and questions from webinar participants.

The number of children living in multigenerational households has been increasing steadily since the 1980s, and as of 2021, more than 10% of children share a home with two or more generations. About 30% of children will live in a multigenerational or skipped-generation household at some point during their childhood. This is even more common for children of color and for those whose adult family members are low income. The Institute for Research on Poverty will host a virtual session on September 6, 2023 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. ET to examine the scope of the issue and its implications for child wellbeing and security, as well as opportunities in policy and practice to support these household members.

There is an increasing understanding of how poverty can impact children’s development and create persistent gaps between children raised in poverty and their higher-income peers. Early childhood programs do much to support young children by providing a variety of vital services to stabilize families, but stability is tenuous for families living persistently in poverty. Numerous innovative early childhood programs are now focusing on promoting parental economic mobility and working alongside families to build skills and promote their attainment of bigger goals. This EMPath paper presents the importance to early childhood programs, particularly those whose mission is to support children living in poverty, of integrating economic mobility coaching for parents to strengthen outcomes for kids.

Family, friend, and neighbor (FFN) child care is used by millions of families, whether it is a regular, paid arrangement, a grandmother who “just provides a few hours of care each week” for her grandchildren, or a well-known neighbor who “watches the kids on her block after school.” This report is a follow-up to Sustaining Family, Friend, and Neighbor Child Care During and After COVID-19: Survey Findings, which offered guiding principles for policymakers to take into consideration as they designed child care policies to be more effective and equitable for families and providers. The report demonstrates how those guiding principles can be applied using specific examples of state strategies to support and sustain FFN child care and empower FFN providers.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Family-Centered Community Change (FCCC) is a two-generation effort in Buffalo, New York; Columbus, Ohio; and San Antonio, Texas. This report estimates the staff labor costs for two-generation coordination and integration in these three communities, which may assist other localities and nonprofit service providers in budget planning, specifically for partnership development and coordinated service delivery.