This Casey Family Programs brief identifies a practice model for reducing the need for foster care and building permanent families. The practice model draws on input from professional staff, youth, biological parents, resource families, and community partners. The model identifies potential strategies and program interventions that advance legal and relationship permanency and proposes approaches that strengthen families and improve the processes for individualized case management and integrated service delivery.

This updated and expanded report from the Congressional Research Service provides a summary of TANF block grant information and addresses frequently asked questions. The report covers TANF funding and expenditures, TANF caseload data, level of TANF cash benefits, and TANF work participation standards.

This Child Trends infographic presents analysis from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis Reporting System (AFCARS) data. It presents a graphic of the United States that illustrates 39 states that experienced an increase in FY 2017 in the number of children and young persons in foster care. According to the latest data, 5.8 of every 1,000 U.S. children were in foster care in 2017.

Studying large public social programs can be a challenge for social scientists. Recent technological developments have allowed researchers to use big data — data sets that combine survey and administrative data — to examine how social programs work and how they affect their participants. One method by which researchers accomplish this is “text mining,” a process of finding patterns from large amounts of unstructured text data. In this report from Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, researchers explore how text mining contributed to a better understanding of the behavior of families in the foster care system and the role of the courts on reunification.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services highlights the importance of kinship care – care by a close relative or friend – if a child cannot remain with their parents. Research has shown that children have the best outcomes when raised in a supportive environment by people they know. This article emphasizes the preference for kinship connections and provides links to the Children’s Bureau website, where there are tips and advice for those interested in child welfare and kinship care. The website also hosts an outreach tool to help advocates and professionals engage the public in fostering child well-being.

This paper tests the relationship between maternal depression, parental quality, and child outcomes. It finds that experiencing adversity as a child is a factor in current maternal depression, which in turn affects parental engagement and sensitivity to children’s distress, but not non-distress. Thus, different interventions should be used for mothers who have experienced trauma depending on whether the goal is identifying and responding to distress signals or increasing parental sensitivity to their children overall.

While much attention is given to healthy family care of children, non-parental care is talked about far less. This October 16 webinar from the Annie E. Casey Foundation will be directed toward kin caregivers and professionals who work with kin caregivers. Presenters will focus on the ways in which kinship care can be different from nonrelative care and on helping relatives navigate children’s emotions around their parents in a healthy way. For more information on Annie E. Casey Foundation resources for kinship families and professionals, visit the webinar registration page or the foundation’s website.

In response to several proposed federal changes to safety net program requirements, the Urban Institute developed a Well Being and Basic Needs Survey (WBNS) and published a report on the status of individual and family health and well-being. The data serves as a baseline against which to measure deviations as a result of potential policy change. Despite a low unemployment rate and growing labor market, the first round of WBNS data from 2017 shows that nearly 40 percent of adults had trouble meeting at least one basic need, a number which may increase due to proposed safety net changes. Hispanic, black, female, young, ill, and less educated demographics are the most likely to face hardships. The survey will continue to measure potential effects of policy changes and highlight areas of programmatic need.

The National Resource Center for Healthy Marriage and Families published this 2016 research brief to familiarize people with the prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) and how the abuse affects exposed children across the country. The brief addresses the dynamics of perpetuated IPV and the impacts on children in a physical, emotional, cognitive, social, and behavioral sense. This brief is meant to serve as a resource in preventative and aftercare methods, including information on “red flags” and post-abuse therapists and hotlines.