According to the Census Bureau, 7.8 million children lived with at least one grandparent in 2009, a 64 percent increase since 1991. The data was collected in 2009 as part of the household relationship module of the Survey of Income and Program Participation. The Survey of Income and Program Participation is a longitudinal panel survey of demographic information, income, labor force characteristics, and program participation in the United States with supplemental topics on child well-being, child care, and household relationships. Census demographers note that the living arrangements of children in the United States is an important indicator of child well-being.

From Lawrence Mead and Ron Haskins, through the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, this article analyzes why low-skilled men typically work in lower level positions and provide little support for their children. Authors argue for a program to tie child support with work requirements, which is an initiative that has previously been shown to increase employment. In particular, authors highlight the Noncustodial Parents Choices (NCP Choices) program in Texas as an example to build work enforcement into the child support system.

Work supports such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, child care subsidies, and public health insurance can often help low-income working families reach self-sufficiency. Using the National Center for Children in Poverty’s Family Resource Simulator and Basic Needs Budget Calculator, authors provide an overview of the cost of living in North Dakota, which demonstrates the importance of work supports in helping low-income working families. Authors provide an assessment of how the current work support policies help families and the impact that slight increases in eligibility could have for working families.

This working paper examines the relationship between material hardship and child behavior using the Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study Data. Researchers analyze if economic and financial hardship associates with child socio-emotional behavior, if certain types of hardship are more associated with socio-emotional outcomes, and if there are strong affects for more recent hardship. Results show that children in homes with more material hardship have more aggression and exhibit more withdrawn and anxious behavior.

As part of the Metropolitan Policy Program through the Brookings Institution, this paper analyzes poverty across cities and suburbs as a result of the recession. Since December 2007, 6.6 million people have become unemployed, and the need for assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly, food stamps) has reached a high. The author provides an analysis of unemployment and food stamps as indicators of poverty to understand how poverty across these areas has unevenly increased.

The Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) recently launched a Fact Sheet Series. The child support program serves a quarter of all children and half of all poor children. Created primarily to recover welfare costs, Congress has steadily embraced a broader mission for the child support program through legislative change, resulting in a gradual shift to a program that promotes child well-being and family self-sufficiency by making child support a reliable source of income.

While working well for most families, the program has faced a greater challenge serving low-income parents. To improve child support outcomes for all, State child support agencies are now using a wide range of family-centered innovations to increase the ability of parents to support their children, in recognition that collection of support depends on the noncustodial parent’s employment, cooperation between parents, and parents’ emotional connection with their children.

Often, the most effective way to make sure that children can count on regular child support payments is to address the underlying reasons parents are not paying their obligations, whether they are unemployment, parental conflict, or disengagement. State child support agencies are partnering with fatherhood, workforce, and reentry programs in outreach, referral, case management and other strategies that are often organized into six areas:

1. Preventing the need for child support enforcement,

2. Engaging fathers from the birth of their first child,

3. Promoting family economic stability,

4. Helping build healthy family relationships,

5. Ensuring that families have meaningful health care coverage, and

6. Preventing and reducing family violence.

To celebrate Father’s Day, OCSE released a series of fact sheets highlighting how child support innovations in each of these areas can improve child support and child well-being. The fact sheets provide examples of promising practices from across the country.

In honor of Father’s Day, the Child Support Report for June 2011 features three personal essays from leaders in the field, along with several perspectives on the child support program from State child support directors and researchers.

The Office of Family Assistance began the Rural Communities Initiative in 2008, and many rural areas expressed an interest in learning more about how to utilize technology in their TANF programs and in their communities. This Webinar included presentations from Ms. Mary Campanola, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Rural Development, Telecommunications Program; Ms. Sheryl Rehberg, Executive Director, North Florida Workforce Development Board; and Mr. Stan Brodka, Director of Sales, KeyTrain. (author abstract)

Congress recently passed legislation mandating that food prescribed in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA’s) Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) be provided using electronic benefit transfer (EBT), which operates like a debit card. Ten State agencies currently provide WIC benefits using EBT, and many other States are in the process of implementing EBT technology in the WIC program. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, reauthorizing USDA’s child nutrition and WIC programs, requires that all States use EBT technology by 2020. Utilizing EBT technology will enable WIC moms to purchase WIC foods without the visibility of paper vouchers. The EBT system will also provide data to WIC State agencies on each food item purchased so they can better manage food costs through informed food package decisions and rebates on infant formula. EBT will also assist retailers in efficiently completing WIC transactions.

Authors in this paper, published in the Health Affairs journal, provide estimates of the rates across States for participating children as well as uninsured eligible children. Nationally, 7.3 million were uninsured on any given day in 2008, and around sixty-five percent or 4.7 million were eligible but not enrolled in the public programs. Authors also give variation in participation rates across States, which range from fifty-five to ninety-five percent.