Brief
Early childhood is a critical period of development. Home visiting programs support a safe and nurturing environment for children by promoting positive parenting and school readiness and by reducing the risk of child maltreatment (Avellar & Supplee, 2013; Peacock et al, 2013). Evidence of their effectiveness in supporting positive child outcomes has propelled expansion of these programs in the United States (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000; Michalopoulos et al, 2019).
The purpose of this brief is to explore possible barriers to father engagement in home visiting programs,…
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Journal Article This project explored the integration of Responsible Fatherhood within Foster Care Service within Philadelphia Pennsylvania. It was hypothesized that the key to reducing the number of children who are at risk of entering, re-entering and remaining in various systems of care are the social service programs and systems created to meet the needs of children. One element to improve the outcomes for children is to establish that engaging fathers of foster children can be important not only for the potential benefit of a child-father relationship but also for making placement decisions and…
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Low-income families face significant challenges navigating both low-wage employment or education and training programs and also finding good-quality child care. Programs that intentionally combine services for parents and children can help families move toward economic security and create conditions that promote child and family well-being. Although these programs in general are not new (see Background), policymakers and program leaders are now experimenting with innovative approaches to combining services. Yet, most currently operating programs, sometimes called “two-generation” or “dual…
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Child Protective Services (CPS) and domestic violence centers are two institutions dedicated to ensuring the safety of families. Child maltreatment and domestic violence often occur within the same families, thus CPS and domestic violence centers share many mutual clients. Despite their shared goals, CPS and domestic violence centers have different service philosophies and procedures that can come into conflict when working with families who are involved with CPS and also receiving domestic violence services. This new brief describes the lessons learned from the first year of a pilot…
Brief
This is the fifth in a series of research briefs commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that draws on the Family Options Study to inform HHS and HHS grantees as they carry out their special responsibilities for preventing and ending the homelessness of families, children, and youth. It expands on the information in the first brief "Are Homeless Families Connected to the Social Safety Net?"
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Journal Article The majority of teen pregnancy literature and practice is deficit based, focusing on the consequences of teen pregnancy; significantly less research is devoted to the teens’ strengths. This article discusses the strengths-based perspective as a viable framework for clinicians and school social workers to implement to help teen parents and their families ameliorate some of the challenges they encounter. This article emphasizes the importance of clinicians, school social workers, and the community to adopt a strengths-based perspective when working with teen parents in order to cultivate…
Brief
This brief explores child and partner separations among families experiencing homelessness.Additionally, the brief examines: family separations and reunifications in the 20 months after being in emergency shelter and; the association between family separation and recent housing instability following the initial shelter stay. This is the fourth in a series of research briefs sponsored by OPRE and ASPE that draws on data collected as part of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Family Options Study. The Family Options Study has data on 2,282 homeless families with children in…
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Journal Article This study extended work on the consequences of incarceration for families by linking parents’ incarcerations to their material support of children entering adulthood. It examined two categories of support, parental transfers of cash and shared housing, that are known deficits among young children of incarcerated parents and that play important roles in young adult attainment and well-being. Propensity score analyses of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N [Wave3] = 14,023; N [Wave4] = 14,361) revealed that previously incarcerated mothers were less likely to give…
Brief
This brief is a resource for human service professionals on child safety and risk assessments in AI/AN communities. It is informed by the work of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) with tribal child welfare professionals and by concerns in the field about the effectiveness of standard assessments in tribal communities. A majority of the tribal organizations that received ACF grants in 2011 to coordinate Tribal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and child welfare services (9 of 14 grantees) used safety and risk assessments in their practice (Ahonen et al., 2016).…
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Journal Article In this article, we test how out-of-home placement affects men's labor market attachment, and in so doing we provide a novel parallel to existing research on how fatherhood affects men, which focuses almost exclusively on a child's arrival. Using population panel data from Denmark that include all first time fathers whose children were placed in out-of-home care from 1995 to 2005, we find that having a child placed in care is associated with up to a 4 percentage point increase in welfare dependency. Having a child placed in out-of-home care appear to aggravate conditions that likely…
