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Racial differences in school readiness are a form of health disparity. By examining, from the perspective of low-income minority families participating in an Early Head Start study, community and policy environments as they shape and inform lived experiences, we identified several types of social and economic dislocation that undermine the efforts of parents to ready their children for school. The multiple dislocations of community triggered by housing and welfare reform and "urban renewal" are sources of stress for parents and children and affect the health and development of young children. Our findings suggest that racial differences in school readiness result not from race but from poverty and structural racism in American society.

The complex issues associated with barriers to treatment entry for parents who are involved with child welfare has not been well explored. Accessing timely treatment is now critical for these parents since the introduction of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, limiting the time until a permanency decision is made. Using a longitudinal, qualitative approach, substance-abusing parents from 15 families, their relevant family members, and service providers were interviewed approximately every 3 months over an 18-month period. The experiences of these parents add to our knowledge of the unique barriers this population faces, and expands our understanding of the mechanisms by which certain barriers may delay treatment.

Meeting the needs of families involved with the child welfare system because of a substance abuse issue remains a challenge for child welfare practitioners. In order to improve services to these families, there has been an increasing focus on improving collaboration between child welfare, treatment providers, and the court systems. This paper presents the results from qualitative interviews with 104 representatives of these three systems that explore how the collaborative process works to benefit families, as well as the barriers and supports for building successful collaborations. Results indicate that collaboration has at least three major functions: building shared value systems, improving communication, and providing a "team" of support. Each of these leads to different kinds of benefits for families as well as providers and has different implications for building successful collaborative interventions. Despite these putative benefits, providers within each system, however, continue to struggle to build effective collaborations, and they face such issues as deeply ingrained mistrust and continued lack of understanding of other systems' values, goals, and perspectives. Challenges that remain for successful collaborations are discussed.

The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) was designed to promote more timely permanent placements for children in the child welfare system. To date, however, available data have said little about whether ASFA is meeting its intended goals. This study looks at the impact of ASFA on parents struggling with substance abuse issues. The authors compared child welfare outcomes, pre- and post-ASFA, for children of more than 1,900 substance-abusing women with some treatment involvement. After the implementation of ASFA, children in this study spent less time in foster care, were placed in permanent settings more quickly, and were more likely to be adopted than remain in long-term foster care. The proportion of children who were reunified with their parent or parents stayed the same. These outcomes were apparent even controlling for case and family characteristics. Results are discussed in terms of the influence of ASFA on service delivery systems.

The passage of the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), which calls for timely permanency planning for children placed into state foster care systems, has led to increased attention to the need for timely and appropriate treatment services to families with substance abuse issues who are involved with child welfare. Using statewide administrative data collected before and after the implementation of ASFA, the present study explores the influence of ASFA, as well as other family characteristics, on patterns of treatment service utilization by child-welfare involved clients. Findings suggest that in the period following the ASFA legislation, mothers entered substance abuse treatment significantly more quickly after the start of their child welfare cases, and remained in treatment longer, compared to pre-ASFA. No differences in rates of treatment completion were found. Results are interpreted in terms of the changing treatment service context, enhanced collaboration between child welfare and treatment systems, and the possible influence of the legislation on parents' motivation to enter treatment.

Meeting the needs of families who are involved with the child welfare system because of a substance abuse issue remains a challenge for child welfare practitioners. In order to improve services to these families, there has been an increasing focus on improving collaboration between child welfare, treatment providers, and the court systems. This paper presents the results from qualitative interviews with 104 representatives of these three systems that explore how the collaborative process works to benefit families, as well as the barriers and supports for building successful collaborations. Results indicate that collaboration has at least three major functions: building shared value systems, improving communication, and providing a "team" of support. Each of these leads to different kinds of benefits for families as well as providers and has different implications for building successful collaborative interventions. Despite these putative benefits, providers within each system, however, continue to struggle to build effective collaborations, and they face such issues as deeply ingrained mistrust and continued lack of understanding of other systems' values, goals, and perspectives. Challenges that remain for successful collaborations are discussed. (Contains 1 figure and 2 footnotes.)

The complex issues associated with barriers to treatment entry for parents who are involved with child welfare has not been well explored. Accessing "timely" treatment is now critical for these parents since the introduction of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, limiting the time until a permanency decision is made. Using a longitudinal, qualitative approach, substance-abusing parents from 15 families, their relevant family members, and service providers were interviewed approximately every 3 months over an 18-month period. The experiences of these parents add to our knowledge of the unique barriers this population faces, and expands our understanding of the mechanisms by which certain barriers may delay treatment. (Contains 1 footnote.)

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2006.08.006 Byline: Beth L. Green (a), Anna Rockhill (b), Carrie Furrer (c) Keywords: Substance abuse; Child welfare system; Treatment services Abstract: Although substance abuse is one of the primary reasons that parents become involved with the child welfare system, there is surprisingly little empirical research that examines the relationship of substance abuse treatment to child welfare outcomes. In this statewide longitudinal study of 1911 women who had children placed in substitute care, we examined the influence of three key factors in the treatment process on child welfare outcomes. Results indicated that when these women entered treatment more quickly, spent more time in treatment, or completed at least one treatment episode, their children spent fewer days in foster care and were more likely to be reunified with their parents. These findings were significant even controlling for families' levels of risk including treatment and child welfare history, substance abuse frequency and chronicity, and demographic risks. Implications of these findings for improvements in the way that treatment services are provided to women in the child welfare system are discussed. Author Affiliation: (a) NPC Research, 4380 SW Macadam Ave, Suite 530, Portland, OR, 97239, United States (b) Child Welfare Partnership, United States (c) NPC Research, United States Article History: Received 12 November 2005; Revised 1 August 2006; Accepted 9 August 2006

The present study used state administrative databases to examine the 2-year outcomes of a large-scale randomized study of the impact of the Healthy Families Oregon (HFO) home visiting program. 2727 eligible first-time mothers were randomly assigned to either the HFO program or to a community services-as-usual control group. Outcomes for the current study were tracked for 2 years post-random assignment for all study participants through administrative data linkages to Oregon's statewide child welfare system, self-sufficiency services, and substance abuse treatment programs. Results indicated that families assigned to HFO program were no more or less likely to have a substantiated child abuse report than were controls (6.3% vs. 6.0%), but were significantly more likely to have an unsubstantiated report (9.7% vs. 7.9%). Among HFO families who were reported to the child welfare system, 86.2% (94 children) were reported after they had exited the program, while 13.8% (15 children) had a report while enrolled. However, 50.5% of children with unsubstantiated reports were reported while families were receiving HFO services, suggesting a surveillance effect for unsubstantiated reports. HFO families, compared to controls, were also significantly more likely to have been enrolled in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) services for the first time, to have received more days of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and to be enrolled in publically-funded substance abuse treatment services. Results suggest that early effects of home visitation on outcomes that can be measured through administrative data are small to modest, and that findings related to documented child welfare systems involvement may require more nuanced data than are typically used and/or available from state agency systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in using administrative data collected by state child welfare agencies as a source of information for research and evaluation. The challenges of obtaining access to and using these data, however, have not been well documented. This study describes the processes used to access child welfare records in six different states and the approach to combining and using the information gathered to evaluate the impact of the Early Head Start program on children's involvement with the child welfare system from birth through age eleven. We provide “lessons learned” for researchers who are attempting to use this information, including being prepared for long delays in access to information, the need for deep understanding of how child welfare agencies record and code information, and for considerable data management work for translating agency records into analysis-ready datasets. While accessing and using this information is not easy, and the data have a number of limitations, we suggest that the benefits can outweigh the challenges and that these records can be a useful source of information for policy-relevant child welfare research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The high societal and personal costs of child maltreatment make identification of effective early prevention programs a high research priority. Early Head Start (EHS), a dual generational program serving low-income families with children prenatally through age three years, is one of the largest federally funded programs for infants and toddlers in the United States. A national randomized trial found EHS to be effective in improving parent and child outcomes, but its effectiveness in reducing child maltreatment was not assessed. The current study used administrative data from state child welfare agencies to examine the impact of EHS on documented abuse and neglect among children from seven of the original seventeen programs in the national EHS randomized controlled trial. Results indicated that children in EHS had significantly fewer child welfare encounters between the ages of five and nine years than did children in the control group, and that EHS slowed the rate of subsequent encounters. Additionally, compared to children in the control group, children in EHS were less likely to have a substantiated report of physical or sexual abuse, but more likely to have a substantiated report of neglect. These findings suggest that EHS may be effective in reducing child maltreatment among low-income children, in particular, physical and sexual abuse. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper presents results from the first large-scale outcome study of American Family Treatment Drug Courts (FTDCs)—specialised courts designed to work with substance-abusing parents involved with the child welfare system. The paper examines whether court, child welfare and treatment outcomes differed for 301 families served through three FTDCs as compared to a matched sample of 1,220 families with substance abuse issues who received traditional child welfare services. Propensity score weights were used to account for measured differences between the FTDC and comparison groups. Child welfare outcomes were analysed using analytical techniques that controlled for these inherently nested data (i.e. children within a family). Overall, the study found that FTDC mothers had more positive treatment outcomes than similar mothers who were not served by the FTDC. FTDC mothers were more likely to enter substance abuse treatment services than were non-FTDC mothers, entered treatment more quickly after their initial court petition than did non-FTDC mothers, spent twice as much time in treatment than did non-FTDC mothers and were twice as likely to complete at least one treatment episode than non-FTDC mothers. In addition, data from the study indicate that FTDCs influence a key child welfare variable of interest: FTDC children were significantly more likely to be reunified with their mothers than were unserved children. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family treatment drug courts (FTDCs) are a rapidly expanding program model designed to improve treatment and child welfare outcomes for families involved in child welfare who have substance abuse problems. The present study compares outcomes for 250 FTDC participants to those of similar parents who did not receive FTDC services in four sites. Results show that FTDC parents, compared to comparison parents, entered substance abuse treatment more quickly, stayed in treatment longer, and completed more treatment episodes. Furthermore, children of KTDG parents entered permanent placements more quickly and were more likely to be reunified with their parents, compared to children of non-F1DC participants. Finally, the FTDC program appears to have a "value added" in facilitating positive child welfare outcomes above and beyond the influence of positive treatment experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although service provision models that emphasize individualization of services and family-centered decision making have been widely adopted by a variety of programs for children and families, to date there is little evidence that service provision has changed to reflect these program philosophies. In this study, data collected by staff at 3 community-based family support centers were used to demonstrate an approach to documenting the extent of family-centered practice. Two primary research questions were addressed. First, what evidence is there that program services were delivered in ways consistent with family-centered program philosophies? Second, are there family demographic or psychosocial characteristics that can predict the amount, type, and intensity of service involvement in such voluntary services? Results indicate that although families utilized a wide array of services, there is little evidence that services were provided based on individualized needs of families. However, families who were categorized as being at high risk for negative child outcomes tended to receive more services of all types, more intensive services, and remained in the programs longer compared to low-risk families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Short term impacts of early childhood programs can lead to reduced child maltreatment. • Children who benefited from Early Head Start's positive effects on parenting, parenting stress and family conflict were less likely to be maltreated later in life. • The positive effects of the EHS program on children's development contributed to reductions in maltreatment. • It is important for prevention research to test mediators of long-term outcomes even in the absence of direct long term impacts. While there is growing evidence that early childhood prevention programs can have positive outcomes for children and families, research has tended to focus on short-term outcomes, with fewer studies of long-term benefits. In addition, evaluations of such programs rarely go beyond the question, "does the program work?" despite numerous calls over the past decade for more research that can help understand how these programs have their effects. Using longitudinal, experimental data from the Early Head Start (EHS) Research and Evaluation Project (EHSREP) linked to child welfare agency records for 2794 children, we examined the effectiveness of EHS birth-to-three services in preventing child maltreatment during children's first 15 years of life. Following this, we assessed whether changes in specific child and family outcomes at ages 2 and 3 acted as mediators for later maltreatment prevention. Results showed that EHS has a long-term impact on the likelihood of child welfare system involvement that is driven by earlier impacts on parenting behaviors, family well-being, and child developmental status. By children's second birthday, families randomly assigned to participate in EHS had lower family conflict and parenting distress, and more positive parent-child interactions; these impacts, in turn, led to later reductions in the likelihood of children being involved with the child welfare system through age fifteen years. Furthermore, at age three, children in EHS were more attentive and engaged in play with their parents and had higher scores on cognitive development assessments compared to controls; these outcomes were similarly associated with long-term reductions in the likelihood of child maltreatment. These findings suggest that early two-generational programs, like EHS, that are able to successfully decrease family conflict and stress and support positive, emotionally responsive parenting and child development, may reduce the likelihood of abuse and neglect later in life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]