The California Linkages Program: Doorway to Housing Support for Child Welfare‐Involved Parents

Housing instability can complicate parents’ efforts to provide for their children. Child welfare service agencies have had difficulty adequately serving parents’ housing needs due to limited and constrained funding streams. This article integrates the voices of four important stakeholders to illuminate how an innovative model of service system coordination called Linkages addresses housing needs for child welfare‐involved parents eligible for public assistance. Facilitated by Linkages, these parents can receive supportive housing services through programs affiliated with the California public assistance program CalWORKs. Personal narratives reflecting the diverse perspectives of stakeholders in the Linkages collaboration—the statewide program director, a child welfare services coordinator, a CalWORKs caseworker, and a parent program participant—shed light on how the collaboration assists parents in attaining case plan goals, and highlights some of the factors facilitating and hindering effective collaboration between the agencies involved. Stakeholders emphasized the value of flexible service approaches, the intensity of the efforts required, the role of advocacy, and the importance of a shared vision between agencies working together to provide housing supports.     

The Impact of Family Unification Housing Vouchers on Child Welfare Outcomes

This study addresses whether providing housing vouchers through the Family Unification Program (FUP) to families involved in the child welfare system reduces child maltreatment and the need for child welfare services. The study uses child welfare administrative data on 326 children in Portland, Oregon, and 502 children in San Diego, California from the point at which their families were referred to the program through 18 months post‐referral. Using a quasi‐experimental waitlist comparison design, probit regressions show little impact of FUP on preventing child removal from home, but some positive impact on reunification among children already placed out of home. Hazard estimations show receipt of FUP speeds up child welfare case closure. Impacts on new reports of abuse and neglect are mixed, but point toward reduced reports. Low rates of removal among intact comparison families and high rates of reunification for children in out‐of‐home care suggest poor targeting of housing resources. Housing vouchers are being given to families not bearing the risks the program is intended to address. The presence of some positive findings suggests that housing vouchers might help reduce child welfare involvement if better targeting were practiced by child welfare agencies.     

Parents’ adjustment following the death of their child: Resilience is multidimensional and differs across outcomes examined

We examine whether the previously reported commonness of resilience to significant adversity extends to parents’ death of a child. To examine our research questions, we apply growth mixture models to longitudinal data from 461 parents in the HILDA study who had experienced child loss. The proportion of parents manifesting resilience were 44%, 56%, 21%, 32%, and 16% for life satisfaction, negative affect, positive affect, general health, and physical functioning, respectively. Only 5% were resilient across all five indices, whereas 28% did not show a resilient trajectory across all outcomes. Social connectedness, anticipating comfort when distressed, and everyday role functioning were the strongest predictors of resilient adaptation. Findings underscore that resilience is not a unidimensional construct.Words: 115.     

Breastfeeding and motor development: A longitudinal cohort study

BackgroundWhile there is a large body of work supporting the importance of early feeding practices on cognitive, immunity, behavioural and mental outcomes, few longitudinal studies have focused on motor development. The relationship between duration of breast feeding and motor development outcomes at 10, 14, and 17 years were examined.MethodsData were obtained from the Western Australian Pregnancy (Raine) Study. There were 2868 live births recorded and children were examined for motor proficiency at 10 (M = 10.54, SD = 2.27), 14 (M = 14.02, SD = 2.33) and 17 (M = 16.99, SD = 2.97) years using the McCarron Assessment of Neuromuscular Development (MAND). Using linear mixed models, adjusted for covariates known to affect motor development, the influence of predominant breast feeding for <6 months and ⩾6 months on motor development outcomes was examined.ResultsBreast feeding for ⩾6 months was positively associated with improved motor development outcomes at 10, 14 and 17 years of age (p = 0.019, β 1.38) when adjusted for child’s sex, maternal age, alcohol intake, family income, hypertensive status, gestational stress and mode of delivery.ConclusionEarly life feeding practices have an influence on motor development outcomes into late childhood and adolescence independent of sociodemographic factors.     

Investigating the neurodevelopmental mediators of aggression in children with a history of child maltreatment:An exploratory field study

Maltreatment of children is a chronic community problem that increases the risk of future aggression. Despite several decades of research highlighting this relationship, few studies have explored the potential neuropsychological deficits that are likely to mediate it. This exploratory study aimed to examine how child maltreatment may be associated with aggression via impairment in the developing prefrontal-limbic-autonomic pathways that are implicated in neuropsychological models of aggression. Furthermore, it aimed to investigate the relationship between child maltreatment and both reactive and proactive aggression subtypes. To investigate this non-invasively in an at-risk population, children with a documented protective care history (n = 20) and a community control group (n = 30), aged between 6 and 12 years, were compared on measures of cardiovascular functioning, affect regulation and cognitive functioning aligned with this neuropsychological model. Whilst no group differences were found on cardiovascular functioning (i.e., resting heart rate, heart rate reactivity, heart rate variability), the protective care group performed significantly worse on measures of affect regulation and cognitive functioning (i.e., global intelligence, executive functioning, smell identification and social cognition). The relationship between child maltreatment and aggression was mediated by executive dysfunction and affect dysregulation but not global IQ, social cognition or olfactory identification. The results suggest that interventions targeting aggression in maltreated children will benefit from clinical assessment and psychological strategies that address the executive dysfunction and affect dysregulation that has been associated with this clinical outcome.     

A structural equation modeling of executive functions,IQ and mathematical skills in primary students: Differential effects on number production,mental calculus and arithmetical problems

Though the relationship between executive functions (EFs) and mathematical skills has been well documented, little is known about how both EFs and IQ differentially support diverse math domains in primary students. Inconsistency of results may be due to the statistical techniques employed, specifically, if the analysis is conducted with observed variables, i.e., regression analysis, or at the latent level, i.e., structural equation modeling (SEM). The current study explores the contribution of both EFs and IQ in mathematics through an SEM approach. A total of 118 8- to 12-year-olds were administered measures of EFs, crystallized (Gc) and fluid (Gf) intelligence, and math abilities (i.e., number production, mental calculus and arithmetical problem-solving). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) offered support for the three-factor solution of EFs: (1) working memory (WM), (2) shifting, and (3) inhibition. Regarding the relationship among EFs, IQ and math abilities, the results of the SEM analysis showed that (i) WM and age predict number production and mental calculus, and (ii) shifting and sex predict arithmetical problem-solving. In all of the SEM models, EFs partially or totally mediated the relationship between IQ, age and math achievement. These results suggest that EFs differentially supports math abilities in primary-school children and is a more significant predictor of math achievement than IQ level.     

"Frequent frames" in German child-directed speech: a limited cue to grammatical categories

Mintz (2003) found that in English child-directed speech, frequently occurring frames formed by linking the preceding (A) and succeeding (B) word (A_x_B) could accurately predict the syntactic category of the intervening word (x). This has been successfully extended to French (Chemla, Mintz, Bernal, & Christophe, 2009). In this paper, we show that, as for Dutch (Erkelens, 2009), frequent frames in German do not enable such accurate lexical categorization. This can be explained by the characteristics of German including a less restricted word order compared to English or French and the frequent use of some forms as both determiner and pronoun in colloquial German. Finally, we explore the relationship between the accuracy of frames and their potential utility and find that even some of those frames showing high token-based accuracy are of limited value because they are in fact set phrases with little or no variability in the slot position.     

Child temperament and paternal transition to non-residence

Using the Millennium Cohort Study data this study showed that, even after adjustment, resident biological fathers of high-regularity children at 9 months were less likely than resident biological fathers of low-regularity children at 9 months to become non-resident by the time these children were 3 years old.     

A Typology of Youth Participation and Empowerment for Child and Adolescent Health Promotion

Research suggests that increasing egalitarian relations between young people and adults is optimal for healthy development; however, the empirical assessment of shared control in youth–adult partnerships is emerging, and the field still requires careful observation, identification, categorization and labeling. Thus, our objective is to offer a conceptual typology that identifies degrees of youth–adult participation while considering the development potential within each type. We use an empowerment framework, rooted in evidence-based findings, to identify five types of youth participation: (1) Vessel, (2) Symbolic, (3) Pluralistic, (4) Independent and (5) Autonomous. The typology is constructed as a heuristic device to provide researchers, practitioners and policy-makers with a common language for articulating degrees of youth participation for optimal child and adolescent health promotion.