United States

Since the U.S. legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, several states have passed laws allowing publicly funded child welfare organizations to exclude millions of LGBTQ adults as potential foster parents. This, combined with a Trump administration executive order on religious liberty, is cause for concern over the future of child welfare programs, according to a new policy brief from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).

The 2017 report Parents and the High Cost of Child Care from the advocacy group Child Care Aware of America (CCAoA) illustrates the high cost burden faced by working parents across the United States.

A new national campaign launched last week hopes to raise awareness around childhood trauma, starting with a series of videos that highlight the important roles that adults can play in helping children succeed after experiencing violence.

From a Center for American Progress press release, June 21, 2016:  The child care affordability crisis in the United States can be summed up in two sentences. Sixty-five percent of children younger than age 5 have all co-habiting parents in the workforce. 

Finally, something they can agree on. Over the past five months we have been publishing columns focused on the big issues with how the federal government pays for child welfare. In the course of that coverage our two primary columnists – Richard Wexler, a staunch advocate for keeping families together and largely dismantling the foster care system, and Sean Hughes, who is more inclined to boost funding to foster care while also supporting families – have strongly disagreed over what the data tells us and what we should do differently.

Upbring is a social services agency based in Texas whose mission is to empower communities to improve long-term outcomes for the state’s children. To this end, the agency has committed to funding research for a series of white papers from various research teams, a few of which we have posted in the past (see here, here, here and here).

Earlier this week, the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families and Children’s Bureau released the 2014 edition of their annual Child Maltreatment report. The report summarizes and analyzes data provided by the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), a federally sponsored data collection effort that prompts analysis of state child abuse and neglect information.

The purpose of this study was to assess the presence of evidence-based information about child maltreatment fatalities (CMFs) and risk factors for CMFs in pre-service child welfare training curricula in the United States.

The Dave Thomas Foundation released yesterday the results of a five-year survey of national attitudes toward foster care adoption in the United States, along with the first ever Canadian Foster Care Adoption Attitudes Survey.