Early childhood experiences form the foundation of brain architecture and can have lasting positive or negative impacts on learning, behavior, and health. Today’s best programs and practices can help support child development, but many children are still left behind. This report from the Center on the Developing Child considers lessons learned from five decades of program evaluation research, identifies five core principles to inform policymaking and program development, and discusses the importance of investing in research and development to better the lives of America’s children. The core principles identified include building caregiver skills; matching interventions to sources of significant stress; and supporting the health of the mother and child before, during, and after pregnancy.

Conditional cash transfer programs offer cash assistance to low-income families to reduce immediate hardship, but base this assistance on actions such as investing in children’s educational achievement and family preventive health care, in the hope of improving children’s longer-term success. Evaluations of these programs have found some important successes in reducing poverty and increasing investments in children. Opportunity NYC – Family Rewards is the first comprehensive conditional cash transfer program to be implemented and evaluated in a higher-income country. This article from the Institute for Research on Poverty summarizes a study that looked at whether and how school quality affected Family Rewards program effects on high school students’ educational processes and achievement. This study considers the role of school context in examining the results of a conditional cash transfer program on educational outcomes, and uses an expanded set of outcomes that include children’s approaches to schooling, parental investment in their children, and academic achievement.

Nearly half of young children in the United States are growing up in low-income families. There are 10 million low-income families with children age 8 and under in which parents have limited skills, low wages, and inflexible work schedules. The two generation (two-gen) approach suggests that children succeed when parents succeed, and vice versa. CAP Tulsa and Garrett County Community Action Committee have been implementing two-gen strategies designed to promote stability and vitality for families by addressing the needs of children and parents together. This brief provides an overview of those strategies and identifies lessons learned from each program.

A recent symposium focused specifically on low-income urban men for several reasons. First, nearly two-thirds of young low-educated men are fathers, and fathers represent an important potential source of family income and financial support for children. Next, since 2000, low-income urban men have retreated from employment as median wages for low-skilled workers have dropped and their incarceration rate has shot up. Finally, research on the 1990s' welfare reforms focused on disadvantaged single women with children, whereas relatively little attention has been paid to disadvantaged men. Despite their importance to families and society, the plight of urban men with a high school education or less has not been widely documented. This brief from the Institute for Research on Poverty highlights this demographic, the trends affecting them, and promising practices to improve their lives and the lives of their children.

The Jobs-Plus Public Housing Revitalization Initiative was designed to raise and sustain the employment and earnings of residents of public housing developments. It had three parts: (1) employment services offered at on-site job centers, (2) changes in rent rules that provide financial incentives to work, and (3) community support for work through neighbor-to-neighbor conversations. The initiative was subject to a rigorous evaluation that found that Jobs-Plus boosted residents’ annual earnings by 16 percent, or $1,300 per year. This report from MDRC investigates how Jobs-Plus was replicated in more contemporary settings, analyzing the early implementation experiences of a community-based provider in the Bronx and the San Antonio Housing Authority in Texas.

This May 2016 presentation to Connecticut’s Two-Generational Interagency Workgroup, which supports legislative pilot projects across the state, was provided by Alice M. Forrester, PhD, Chief Executive Officer of the Clifford Beers Clinic in New Haven, CT. She discussed the importance of understanding trauma and its effects on behavior and development when implementing two-generation approaches.

The National Crittenton Foundation, in partnership with Ascend at the Aspen Institute, developed this toolkit to guide use of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) survey in direct service, education, and policy settings. The toolkit is designed to promote healing for individuals impacted by childhood trauma, educate the community about the impact of childhood adversity, and encourage implementation of two-generation policies to prevent ACEs for future generations. Materials provided include a tip sheet, sample protocol, case studies, testimonials, and links to additional resources.

The two-generation approach typically promotes uniting two types of programs to serve families. One type consists of early childhood development programs such as home visiting, Head Start/Early Head Start, and successful transition to elementary school. Simultaneously, two-generation programs attempt to link these efforts to services that focus on parents, including postsecondary education and workforce development. By promoting early education and supports for children along with tools to improve parents’ economic situation, the two-generation approach aims to improve outcomes for both. This brief from Child Trends provides an overview of the approach and calls for more research to explore the potential benefits for families.

Two-generation models aim to interrupt the cycle of poverty by providing services for low-income children and their parents. However, the models themselves vary widely and policymakers and practitioners need guidance on how to best design them to achieve their ambitious goals and capitalize on their multiplier effects. This brief from the Urban Institute builds on the insights from the Housing Opportunities and Services Together (HOST) Demonstration and presents an updated theoretical framework for two-generation models. The framework emphasizes the importance of using family goals as the lens for targeting individual family members, setting individual goals, and aligning tailored solutions.

In recent years, significant focus has been placed on the concept of toxic stress and the impact of adverse experiences in childhood on lifelong health and development. As scientific understanding continues to grow, community leaders are searching for ways to prevent and respond to toxic stress in the lives of young children and their families, in order to achieve healthy development and well-being for all children. Leaders from six communities worked together in 2015 with the Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP) through the Early Childhood-LINC Learning Lab on Community Approaches to Toxic Stress. The communities learned from each other’s experiences, discussed the challenges and opportunities they face, and generated ideas to improve the response to toxic stress in their own communities and in others. This issue brief presents their experiences and recommendations.