Structural Oppression & Solutions

Fathers, children, and families alike benefit from fathers having healthy coparenting and romantic relationships. Child Trends’ new brief for the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation provides fatherhood programs with strategies, policy suggestions, and additional considerations for working with American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) fathers. The brief’s authors outline strategies within three distinct areas of program development and implementation that fatherhood programs can use...

Would you welcome the opportunity to have a series of meaningful conversations with other caring adults, like you, who play important roles in the lives of 0-8-year-old children of color? WHAT. Join EmbraceRace for a community of learning and practice (COLP) series, "Organizing in Defense of Early Racial Learning in Our Schools and Communities." Conversations will focus on what healthy teaching and learning about race looks like in early and middle childhood and how to come together to...

By Rachel Rabkin Peachman, The New York Times, Aug. 16, 2022 Racial differences in medical care are part of a theme experts are seeing “over and over” again. Judith McClellan, a social worker who lives in Salisbury, N.C., knows what it’s like to see her child in pain. Her daughter Kyarra, 15, has sickle cell disease, an inherited red blood cell disorder that most commonly affects Black people and frequently causes pain so excruciating that emergency opioids are necessary. When she was...

By Keyna Franklin and Shakira Paige, Rise Magazine, August 5, 2022 Parents need resources to support LGBTQ children and youth in being affirmed, safe and celebrated in their homes, schools and communities. In our report, An Unavoidable System , Rise recommends expanding access to community-based programs that center the needs of families with LGBTQ children — without family policing system involvement. Here, Rise talks with Caitlin Ryan , Director of the Family Acceptance Project at the...

By Shakira Paige, Rise Magazine, August 5, 2022 My 11-year-old daughter came out to me about a year ago. She sent me a text message that said: “Mom, I’m bi.” She was home in the bathroom when she sent it. I believe she was shy to tell me to my face because she thought she was going to get a bad reaction from me. I texted back, “Okay—I know already.” When she asked me how I knew, I said I knew since she was four that she would be different from my older daughter, who was more stereotypically...

By Rachel Daem, CNN, June 29, 2022 When Justine Larson's son came out as transgender at age 11, she didn't know how to react. Despite being supportive of LGBTQ communities, Larson struggled to accept that her child, assigned female at birth, would have a different life than she imagined. "We didn't give it as much attention as maybe we should have," she said of her and her husband's response. Their child "basically got pretty depressed and even was having some suicidal thoughts." Feeling...

New research from the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families shows that 37 percent of lower-income Latino adults (defined here as those whose incomes are less than 200% of the federal poverty line) living with children reported either frequent anxiety or depressive symptoms during Fall 2021 and Winter 2022—rates that are statistically higher than those among their higher-income peers. Additionally, authors Yiyu Chen and María A. Ramos-Olazagasti find that, regardless of...

Children begin very early in life taking in spoken and unspoken messages about race; it permeates nearly every aspect of life—in the books read to them and those they read, the movies they watch, the music they listen to, the conversations around them, and the relationships and interactions they observe. A resource developed by EmbraceRace seeks to equip parents and caregivers with useful tips they can use to help guide and shape their child's education and perception of race. 16 Ways to...

By Christina Caron, Image by Rachel Levit Ruiz, The New York Times, June 16, 2022 The editor of a new book of essays shares how Black men can attend to their mental health while growing their families. This year Father’s Day will fall on June 19, or Juneteenth, a federal holiday commemorating the emancipation of enslaved Black people in the United States after the Civil War. And for Michael D. Hannon, an associate professor of counseling at Montclair State University in Montclair, N.J., that...

A new brief from the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families shows that over one third of Latino parents have experienced a mental health disorder at some point in their lives—a lower rate than among non-Hispanic parents. To help Latino parents cope with mental health disorders, researchers suggest that the mental health field provide culturally informed, responsive, and sensitive care that recognizes the diversity of the Latino community. Researchers analyzed data from...

By Eboo Patel, Image by Arne Bellstorf, The New York Times, May 10, 2022 I first heard the phrase “white supremacy” in my introductory sociology course at the University of Illinois in 1993. The image of men wearing white sheets and burning crosses came to mind, and I figured my professor was referring to ancient history. But I remember her continuing: “White supremacy is the assumption that the cultural patterns associated with white people — from clothes to language to aesthetic...

By Matt Bruenig, Cavan Images/Getty Images, The New York Times, April 9, 2022 In some European countries, parents can choose between sending their children to heavily subsidized day care or receiving a stipend from the government to take care of them at home. In most parts of America, parents of babies and toddlers have neither option. The United States is a global outlier among developed countries for its lack of government support for child care. That’s why it’s notable that New York State...