This bulletin from the Children’s Bureau’s Child Welfare Information Gateway highlights supports and services for kinship caregivers, training for caregivers and case workers, and examples of successful State and local kinship programs. It discusses kinship navigator programs and features support services that caseworkers should share with kinship caregivers, including TANF, respite care, and the Guardianship Assistance Program.

This report covers the results of a study completed by the United States Government Accountability Office on challenges facing grandparents and other older kin becoming primary caregivers. The report examines the numbers of grandparents and other kin serving as primary caregivers for children and reasons for that care. It also notes challenges kinship caregivers face and how they are addressed, and the extent to which the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services supports states’ efforts to use relevant programs and initiatives. The report highlights kinship care in four selected communities in New Mexico, New York, Mississippi, and Ohio.

Home visiting programs support parents with education, referrals for community-based services, and goal setting. These programs yield positive impacts such as reduced child maltreatment, better child and maternal health, increased school readiness, and enhanced family economic self-sufficiency. This blogpost includes questions and answers from senior New Jersey officials on the design and implementation of their home visiting programs. Key questions include: How has your approach to home visiting evolved over the years? How were you able to scale up these programs to offer them statewide? What advice would you give to another jurisdiction that wants to develop a home visiting program or network?

Recovery coaching, which helps parents increase access to and engage in substance misuse treatment, has grown since its initial use in the late 1990s. This Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation report features interventions in the child welfare system that include recovery coaches and assesses them for their readiness for replication. The report identifies nine eligible interventions for potential replication under the first phase of the Expanding Evidence on Replicable Recovery and Reunification Interventions for Families (R3) project.

The 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act supports funding for effective, evidence-based kinship navigator programs. This brief illustrates how kinship navigator programs operate and identifies common challenges in program evaluation. These challenges include defining the program models, selecting a comparison group, determining the sample size for the evaluation, and selecting appropriate reliable and valid measures. The brief also offers potential solutions to address these methodological problems in evaluation.

This blogpost assesses strategies state program administrators can use to support parents in managing COVID-19 pandemic-related stress through maximizing home visiting services. The blogpost notes how early childhood home visiting programs, including those federally funded by the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting program, offer three levels of support: direct information on child health and positive parenting practices; screening to identify potential needs, risks, and stressors; and connection of families to resources to address these risks or attain goals set by parents. Childhood home visiting programs can also offer cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to help parents address stress and more serious forms of parental depression. The blogpost describes how additional resources are available to promote early literacy, enhance parent-child interactions, and help parents manage their children’s behaviors and pandemic-related stressors.

A portion of the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program supporting home visits for mothers and families with young children is designated for home visiting in tribal communities. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation report is a systematic review of home visiting models within tribal communities and includes a description of the review process and findings. The report also includes information about the evaluated models and summary conclusions about the models’ effectiveness. The review was first published in February 2011, and the updated edition covers results from research through September 2018.

This research-to-practice brief assesses the implications and lessons learned from implementing evidence-based home visiting services for child welfare-system involved families under the Family First Prevention Services Act. For this assessment, the brief examines a pilot project of 10 Healthy Families America programs, administered by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. The assessment’s results are drawn from program and administrative data as well as interviews of program participants. The brief notes positive benefits of home visiting services, such as increased knowledge of child development, enhanced parenting skills, and improved co-parenting relationships. It also recognizes the difficulty of delivering home visiting services where there are unstable living arrangements and mental health crises among participants.

This report provides findings from a biennial survey of child welfare agencies on their expenditures for state fiscal year (SFY) 2018. The survey intends to support greater understanding among stakeholders about the challenges and opportunities that agencies encounter in delivering services. According to the survey, state and local child welfare agencies rely on multiple funding sources to administer their programs, including Medicaid, Title IV-E, Title IV-B, TANF, the Social Services Block Grant program, and other federal, state, and local sources. In this report, tabular and graphic data illustrate trends in total expenditures for child welfare agencies from SFY 2016 to SFY 2018 and the different uses of funds to cover out-of-home placements, adoption and guardianship programs, child protective services, preventive services, and assistance for older youth. The report covers recent legislation and federal policy changes and how they affect child welfare expenditures. The report also identifies points of consideration for states as they assess how to determine the type of available services they might offer, in light of how states rely on different funding structures for their respective child welfare agencies.

The 20th Research and Evaluation Conference on Self-Sufficiency (RECS) was held virtually on October 13–15 and October 19–22, 2020. The conference sessions were organized in six thematic tracks: TANF Programs, Policies, and Populations; Employment and Mobility in the Labor Market; Youth Well-Being and the Transition to Adulthood; Strengthening Families, Fatherhood, Marriages, and Relationships; Evaluating Social Programs, Building Evidence, and Using Data; and Approaches to Alleviate Poverty and Expand Opportunity. A complete set of videos covering plenary and breakout sessions and a career panel is now available online.