Reports, Research & Policy

Depression in young people is vastly undertreated. About two-thirds of depressed youth don’t receive any mental health care at all . Of those who do, a significant proportion rely on antidepressant medications. Since 2003, however, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has warned that young people might experience suicidal thinking and behavior during the first months of treatment with antidepressants. The FDA issued this warning to urge clinicians to monitor suicidal thoughts at the start...

Families with young children face barriers in finding and accessing services to meet their needs. A complex array of services exists across health, early care and education, economic assistance, and family supports. However, services and supports are rarely coordinated and are too frequently divided by where families live or how much income they have. State partners can be leaders in developing approaches to better connect families to services, but there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Families that experience poverty-related stressors such as income insecurity or loss , material hardship , and housing hardship or instability —in other words, families with a financial inability to provide for their children—are also more likely to come into contact with the child welfare system. The intersection of poverty and economic insecurity with neglect poses a challenge to child welfare agencies when they respond to reports of maltreatment. Of all maltreatment types, neglect is...

By Jeff Stein, Photo: Brittany Greeson/The Washington Post, The Washington Post, February 17, 2022 The number of American children in poverty spiked dramatically in January after the expiration of President Biden’s expanded child benefit at the end of last year, according to new research released on Thursday. The Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University said that the child poverty rate rose from 12 percent in December 2021 to 17 percent last month, an approximately 41...

by Matt Shipman, Medical Xpress, Photo: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain, December 8, 2021 A recent study suggests that teaching children to understand other people’s perspectives could make it easier to learn how to forgive other people. The study also found that teaching children to make sincere apologies can help them receive forgiveness from others. Click here to access the article.

Looking for opinions from former youth residents of residential treatment facilities and their parents. The study team at the University of South Florida Department of Child and Family Studies is conducting a national online survey of former youth residents of residential treatment facilities and their parents and caregivers to understand their experiences and perspective of the care received by the facilities. Download the flyer with information about how to participate here .

By Mavis Sanders, Chrishana M. Lloyd, and Sara Shaw, Photo: Unsplash, Child Trends, February 17, 2022 This brief is part of a larger effort by Child Trends researchers to expand knowledge about Black children and families. This effort includes continued work on Black family cultural assets and the development of a new multi-year applied research agenda on Black children and families. While sometimes prioritizing adults within Black families and sometimes prioritizing children, the goals of...

We did a massive overhaul of our Resource Center . Why it matters : You can find articles, research, reports about PACEs science, practice and policy MUCH more easily. Why we did it : The structure of the old Resource Center wasn't working very well, the content was out-of-date, and useful information was difficult to find. How we did it: With the old Resource Center, we were pretty much trying to fit a square peg into a round hole—we adapted a community page on our social network platform...

By Jackie Spinner, Photo: iStock, The Washington Post, February 10, 2022 For the first time in decades, the nation’s top pediatricians have changed the checklist of developmental milestones for infants and young children to make it easier to identify delays that could be a sign of autism or other social-communication disabilities. The updates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, made with the American Academy of Pediatrics, raised the percentage of children who typically meet...

By The HOPE Team, 2/15/22, https://positiveexperience.org/category/blog/ Dr. Wendy Ellis , joins HOPE’s Director of Training and Technical Assistance, Amanda Winn, for the second vlog in our new series, HOPE Block by Block. This series highlights the work of Black practitioners, scholars, researchers, and community activists during the month of February. In this second episode, Dr. Ellis will address the HOPE building block of environment. The environment building block is about children...

By Lisa A. Gennetian, Christina Gibson-Davis, and Lisa A. Keister, Image: from study, EconoFact, January 20, 2022 The Issue: Research and policies aimed at addressing poverty tend to focus on family income. Yet, the future financial resilience of U.S. households with children will be shaped not only by the income they earn but also by their wealth holdings. Wealth is a critical resource that enables households to deal with unexpected economic shocks — including recent experiences of job loss...

By Anya Kamenetz, Illustration: L.A. Johnson/NPR, National Public Radio, February 10, 2022 Dale Farran has been studying early childhood education for half a century. Yet her most recent scientific publication has made her question everything she thought she knew. "It really has required a lot of soul-searching, a lot of reading of the literature to try to think of what were plausible reasons that might account for this." And by "this," she means the outcome of a study that lasted more than...