Children and Families

A solid majority of Americans, from both parties, endorse paid family and medical leave. There are proposals for paid leave in Congress and the President’s budget. A recent bipartisan proposal from an AEI/Brookings working group, of which I am a member, is also garnering a lot of attention. This is an opportune time to enact a federal policy to provide paid family and medical leave to all employees. 

Elaine Waxman and Corianne Scally of the Urban Institute Research Hub have released a new study examining emerging interventions that integrate housing and health services for low-income people, focusing on interventions where health care organizations have taken a significant leadership role.

ABC/CARE was a comprehensive, birth through age five early childhood development program that included early health, nutrition, parental education and early childhood education. Complementing their recent cost-benefit analysis of the ABC/CARE program, Dr. James Heckman and his team look at the differences in outcomes based on gender in their paper, Gender Differences in the Benefits of an Influential Early Childhood Program.

The research team found that high-quality early childhood education programs had the potential to deliver a 13.7% per child, per year return on investment through better outcomes in health, education, and employment. The economic return of the two programs was substantially higher than had been previously found for preschool programs serving 3- to 4-year-olds, which have previously estimated only a 7-10% return on investment.

Decades of disparities in health between infants born to Black and white mothers have persisted in recent years, despite policy initiatives to improve maternal and reproductive health for Black mothers.

Participating in organized sports has been shown to promote positive social development, contribute to positive youth development, and increase social emotional learning amongst adolescents. The skills acquired through sports participation have potential life course implications and may give adolescents the skills they need to successfully navigate challenges not only during this developmental period, but also later in life.

This study will explore the relationship between the availability and use of paid sick leave on job retention, household finances, and health while understanding the family health impacts of policies that improve workers’ ability to provide parental and family care.

Housing policy is disability policy, particularly for low-income households served by federal housing programs. People with disabilities are overrepresented in federally assisted rental housing, with 407 out of every 1,000 assisted households reporting a disability.

The burdens of racist policies have produced vastly worse pregnancy and birth outcomes for Black and Native populations relative to White populations in the United States. Because state Medicaid programs are the largest single payer for pregnancy care in the country, changes to Medicaid policies are an important way to implement structural interventions to promote racial equity. 

The removal and placement of Indian children away from their families and communities is a central component of historical trauma. Indian child welfare practice must contend with both the restoration of balance at the level of the individual the family and the community while negotiating with a system which has been an instrument of community disruption in the past.

Infant mortality, defined as the death of a baby after birth up to one year of age, is a national indicator of population-level health. The United States has an average infant mortality rate (IMR) of 6 deaths per 1,000 live births, a rate that is more than 70% higher than other comparable, high-resource nations.

This research will generate key evidence needed to understand the effects of exclusionary discipline on equitable access to education and potential alternative strategies that address or prevent the behavioral and emotional difficulties that have given rise to exclusion.