Research Reports and News Posted July
2002:
Fathers—Research | Children
& Families | Fatbers/Mothers
in Prison | Census Data
| Systemic Barriers
| Welfare Reform
| NCOFF Abstracts
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Child Trends DataBank, Child Trends, June 2002.
This new databank provides the latest national trends and research on over 70 key indicators of child and youth well-being, with new indicators added each month.
The DataBank Delivers:
- Continuously updated trend data with the latest national estimates for all indicators
- Plain language reporting on trends and population subgroup differences informed by existing research
- Color graphics and tables that can be downloaded directly into reports and presentations
- PDF files for each indicator containing text, graphics, and tables in a concise and attractive format
- Links that provide organized access to additional information available for each indicator including
- State, local, and international estimates
- Selected current research
- Original source documents
- National goals (where applicable)
DataBank Estimates Come from Reliable Sources:
- Federal reports and Web sites
- Original analyses of national data sets by Child Trends staff, a nationally respected non-partisan, non-profit research firm
DataBank Indicators are Chosen with Care in Consultation with:
- Nationally recognized researchers from the NICHD Family and Child Research Network
- Respected members of the communications field
The DataBank is Designed to Serve Everyone
- Journalists: National trend data from reliable sources, with access to state and local data to "localize" stories
- Policymakers and service providers: Useful information for planning, reports, policy-making, and proposals
- Researchers and students: Detailed descriptive data and links to relevant research
- Advocates: The latest data identifying emerging and continuing areas of need for children and youth
- Parents, youth, and the public: Information that is useful and easy to read
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A League Table of Teenage Births in Rich Nations, UNICEF, June 2002.
The third Innocenti Report Card presents the most up-to-date and comprehensive survey so far of teenage birth rates in the industrialized world. And it attempts at least a partial analysis of why some countries have teenage birth rates that are ten or even fifteen times higher than others. Approximately 1.25 million teenagers become pregnant each year in the 28 OECD nations under review. Of those, approximately half a million will seek an abortion and approximately three quarters of a million will become teenage mothers. The five countries with the lowest teenage birth rates are Korea, Japan, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden - all with teen birth rates of fewer than 10 per 1,000. The United States teenage birth rate of 52.1 is the highest in the developed world ? and more than twice the European average. The United Kingdom has the highest teenage birth rate in Europe.
To obtain a copy of the complete report in PDF format, visit the UNICEF web site.
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Ready to Enter: What Research Tells Policymakers About Strategies
to Promote Social and Emotional School Readiness Among Three- and
Four-Year-Old Children, C. Cybele Raver and Jane Knitzer, Promoting
The Emotional Well-Being of Children and Families, Policy Paper
#3, National Center for Children in Poverty, July 2002.
This policy paper focuses on what emerging research tells policymakers
about why it is so important to intervene to help young children at
risk for poor social, emotional, and behavioral development and what
kinds of research-based interventions seem most effective. It addresses
the relationship between early academic learning and emotional development;
the prevalence of emotional problems in preschool-aged young children
and young children who are exposed to multiple family and environmental
risk factors; and the emerging but still limited research on the efficacy
of preventive and early interventions explicitly targeted to address
the social, emotional, and behavioral difficulties of young children,
particularly in the context of early care and education settings.
For a copy of the complete paper or executive summary, visit the
NCCP
web site.
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Helping Teens Develop Healthy Social Skills and Relationships:
What the Research Shows about Navigating Adolescence, Elizabeth
C. Hair, Justin Jager, and Sarah B. Garret, Child Trends Research
Brief, Child Trends, July 2002.
Overview: Ask anyone who has ever lived with, known, or been
a teenager: adolescence is a time of dramatic change. With adolescence
comes puberty, expanded cognitive abilities, a new sense of self and
identity, and often new and increased expectations at school and work.
Relationships with parents and peers change too. As they mature, adolescentsi
social skills are called upon to form and maintain relationships.
Fortunately, with these relationships, especially those of high quality,
come beneficial outcomes, such as psychological health,27,57 improved
academic performance,58,71 and success in relationships as adults.20,27
Conversely, the absence of such quality relationships is associated
with negative outcomes, such as delinquency and psychological problems.
To explore these critical but frequently ignored elements of adolescent
development, Child Trends carried out a review of more than 360
research studies that relate to social competency in adolescence.
(Social competence is defined as ithe ability to achieve personal
goals in social interaction while at the same time maintaining positive
relationships with others over time and across situations.i) With
the goal of better understanding how adolescents gain the skills
needed to engage in and maintain relationships, we examined the
factors that lead to high-quality social relationships and good
social skills, and we looked at intervention strategies that target
these areas. Significantly, a number of intervention strategies
have been evaluated in experimental studies and found to be effective.
Only experimentally evaluated programs are included in the review
of iwhat works.i Also included in this review are some ibest bets,i
promising practices drawing on experimental and quasi-experimental
evaluations, other research, and the wisdom from practitioners.
This is the third in a series of Research Briefs based on a comprehensive
review of adolescent development research. The American Teens series
covers reproductive health, physical health and safety, social skills,
education, mental and emotional health, and civic engagement as
they relate to adolescents.
For a copy of the complete report in PDF format, visit the Child
Trends web site.
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Encouraging Teens to Adopt a Safe, Healthy Lifestyle: A Foundation
for Improving Future Adult Behaviors, Juliet L. Hatcher, and
Juliet Scarpa, Child Trends, June 2002.
Overview
American teenagers as a group are generally healthy. However, some
of their behaviors compromise their present and future health and
can lead to injuries, which are the leading cause of death for this
age group. By envisioning adolescence as an ideal time to promote
good physical health, we can save lives and set into motion a lifetime
of good health outcomes.
To identify programs that work, Child Trends summarized experimental
studies of health-related behaviors. These are presented in a What
Works table on page 5. Since there are surprisingly few such experimental
studies, Child Trends also reviewed more than 230 research studies
to identify factors associated with better health-related behaviors
and fewer accidents and injuries. Some “Best Bets” –
promising practices drawing on this non-experimental and quasi-experimental
research and the experience of practitioners – are highlighted.
Among the programs found to succeed in helping teens adopt a healthy
lifestyle are those that take a multifaceted approach to promoting
positive health behaviors, incorporating psychosocial and behavioral
components, instead of simply distributing information. Programs
should also work to achieve desirable health behavior changes that
endure over time, not just in the short term. This is a particular
challenge among adolescents. Similarly, programs that aim to prevent
injury among teens are most effective when they reach adolescent
males (who are more likely to engage in such behaviors), address
risky behaviors, and are multifaceted.
This brief is divided into two sections. The first addresses issues
related to promoting healthy lifestyles among teens, including smoking,
exercise and nutrition, and sleep. The second section focuses on
preventing unintended injury, including car and bike accidents,
and occupational injuries.
This is the second in a series of Research Briefs based on a comprehensive
review of adolescent development research. The American Teens series
covers reproductive health, physical health and safety, social skills,
education, mental and emotional health, and civic engagement as
they relate to adolescents.
For a copy of the complete report in PDF format, visit the Child
Trends web site.
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KIDS COUNT 2002 Data Book, Annie E. Casey Foundation, June
2002.
Press Release Excerpt:
Even though millions of parents have successfully moved from welfare to
work in recent years, many are still pressed to provide their children
with basic resources. According to the 2002 KIDS COUNT Data Book released
today, more than 10 million children in America live in families that
are having trouble making ends meet, let alone get ahead, despite the
fact that at least one parent works all year.
"The robust economy and the welfare reforms of the 1990s significantly
helped to increase the number of working parents in low-income families
and to lower the child poverty rate," said Douglas W. Nelson, president
of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which publishes the annual analysis
of child well-being in America. "But the truth is, many low-income
working parents still find it awfully tough - and sometimes impossible
- to meet their kids' needs.
"At the same time," Nelson adds, "the general success
of welfare reform provides a strong platform for building a support
system that can help low-income working parents achieve economic security."
Helping Workers Succeed as Parents
In the 2002 KIDS COUNT Data Book's essay entitled "Balancing the
Equation: Making Economic and Family Success Possible for Low-Income
Working Families," Nelson argues for a range of supports, including
job training, tax credits, savings plans, asset-building strategies,
child care assistance, and health insurance, that together can help
hard-working low-income families become stronger.
"We need to build on the record of the past decade by putting
in place effective policies and opportunities that both help low-income
parents succeed as workers and help low-income workers succeed as parents,"
he notes.
The new report, which features 10 measures of child well-being and
supplemental data on education, health, and economic conditions of families,
defines "low income" as 150 percent of the federal poverty
level ($26,195 for a family of four in 2000).
Overall, the Data Book shows significant progress in the well-being
of American children in the 1990s. Of the 10 measures used to rank states,
seven improved, two deteriorated, and one did not change.
However, a closer look at individual states reveals wide disparities,
particularly among rates for child deaths, teen deaths, and births to
teens. In these three instances, the worst performing states had a rate
more than three times that of the best performing states. ...
All 2002 KIDS COUNT data is now available from an easy-to-use, powerful
online database that allows you to generate custom graphs, maps, ranked
lists, and state-by-state profiles. You can also download the entire
KIDS COUNT data set as delimited text files.
To obtain a free copy of the Kids Count Data Book, or to use the data
online, visit the Casey
Foundation's web site.
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Children Cared for by Relatives: What Do We Know about Their
Well-Being? Amy Billing, Jennifer Ehrle, and Katherine Kortenkamp,
Urban Institute, May 15, 2002.
Sometimes children are not able to live with their parents, possibly
due to a parent's death, incarceration, abuse or neglect, poverty,
mental illness, substance abuse, or unwillingness to raise a child.
During these times relatives often step in to care for these children.
In 1999, 2.3 million children, or 90 percent of children not living
with parents, lived with a relative?or in kinship care?according to
the National Survey of America's Families (NSAF).1,2 Most often relatives
make arrangements to care for the child privately within the family,
but sometimes a child welfare agency will place children who have
been abused or neglected with relatives rather than with unrelated
foster parents (Ehrle and Geen forthcoming). This practice has become
increasingly common among child welfare agencies (U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services 2000).
A separation from a parent for an extended period of time can
potentially be traumatic for a child, yet living with a relative
may minimize the trauma by providing the child with a sense of family
support (Bowlby 1980; Dubowitz et al. 1994). At the same time, previous
research has shown that many children in relative care experience
significant economic hardship (Ehrle, Geen, and Clark 2001). Yet
it is uncertain whether the potentially damaging risks of poverty
to children's development might be moderated by the benefits of
living with a relative. In fact, very little is known about the
well-being of children residing with relatives (Altshuler and Gleeson
1999).
This brief addresses this gap by examining the well-being of children
living in kinship care using two types of comparisons. First, children
living with kin are compared with children living with their parents.
Findings indicate that children in kinship care face significant
barriers to well-being compared with children living with their
parents. Second, since many kinship families are poor, it is possible
that some of these differences may be due to living in poverty (Ehrle
et al. 2001; Lee and Goerge 1999). To address this concern, we compare
children in low-income relative and parent care households (income
falling below 200 percent of the federal poverty level). Given that
children in low-income relative care have also experienced a separation
from their parents, we expected that they would still fare worse
than children residing in low-income parent care. However, findings
suggest that children living with low-income relatives fare worse
on some measures of well-being compared with children living with
low-income parents, but on others they are doing just as well.
Findings are based on data from the 1997 and 1999 rounds of the NSAF,
a nationally representative survey of households with persons under
age 65.3 The NSAF includes measures of the economic, health, and social
characteristics of more than 44,000 households in each of the survey
years. This analysis uses information on the samples of children under
age 18. The sample of children was obtained by randomly selecting
up to two "focal" children, one under 6 years old and one between
the ages of 6 and 17, from each household. This sample of children
was then weighted to be representative of children in the nation.
Information on these children was obtained from the most knowledgeable
adult in the household, the parent or caregiver most knowledgeable
about the child's education and health care.
For a copy of the complete report in PDF format, visit the Urban
Institute's web site.
New Citations from NCOFF's
FatherLit Database
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