Health care reaches more children under age three in the United States than any other family-facing system and represents the most common entry point for developmental assessment of and services for children. In this article, Adam Schickedanz and Neal Halfon examine how well the child health care system promotes healthy child development early in…

Children who experience foster care, write Youngmin Yi and Christopher Wildeman, are considerably more likely than others to have contact with the criminal justice system, both during childhood and as adults. And because children of color disproportionately experience foster care, improvements to the foster care system could reduce racial/ethnic…

It might seem strange to ask whether increasing access to medical care can improve children's health. Yet Lindsey Leininger and Helen Levy begin by pointing out that access to care plays a smaller role than we might think, and that many other factors, such as those discussed elsewhere in this issue, strongly influence children's health.…

We can expect climate change to alter the frequency, magnitude, timing, and location of many natural hazards. For example, heat waves are likely to become more frequent, and heavy downpours and flooding more common and more intense. Hurricanes will likely grow more dangerous, rising sea levels will mean more coastal flooding, and more-frequent and…

Few people would disagree that children with disabilities need adequate health insurance. But what kind of health insurance coverage would be optimal for these children? Peter Szilagyi surveys the current state of insurance coverage for children with special health care needs and examines critical aspects of coverage with an eye to helping policy…

Much attention has aided measurement and improvement in the quality of health care during the past two decades, with new ways to define and measure quality, recognition that doing so can identify strategies to enhance care, and systematic efforts by both government and private insurers to apply these principles. In this article, James Perrin…

In this article, the authors found that the economic circumstances of military families are good, certainly much improved compared with even a decade ago. The military context is nonetheless challenging, with long hours, dangerous work, frequent transfers, and stressful absences during deployment. Service members receive relatively high pay and…

Military children don't exist in a vacuum; rather, they are embedded in and deeply influenced by their families, neighborhoods, schools, the military itself, and many other interacting systems. To minimize the risks that military children face and maximize their resilience, write Harold Kudler and Colonel Rebecca Porter, we must go beyond…

Technological innovation is transforming the prevalence and functional impact of child disability, the scale of social disparities in child disability, and perhaps the essential meaning of disability in an increasingly technology-dominated world. In this article, Paul Wise investigates several specific facets of this transformation. He begins by…

Isabel Sawhill, Adam Thomas, and Emily Monea believe that given the well-documented costs of nonmarital births to the children and parents in fragile families, as well as to society as a whole, policy makers' primary goal should be to reduce births to unmarried parents. The authors say that the nation's swiftly rising nonmarital birth rate has…

Although most Americans know that the U.S. population is aging, they are far less informed about the reality of providing elders with personal care, health care, and social support. Families--particularly women--have always been critical in providing elder care, but the entry of so many women into the paid labor force has made elder care…

Robert Hummer and Erin Hamilton note that the prevalence of fragile families varies substantially by race and ethnicity. African Americans and Hispanics have the highest prevalence; Asian Americans, the lowest; and whites fall somewhere in the middle. The share of unmarried births is lower among most foreign-born mothers than among their U.S.-born…

Poor childhood health contributes to lower socioeconomic status in adulthood. Subsequently, low socioeconomic status among parents contributes to poor childhood health outcomes in the next generation. This cycle can be particularly pernicious for vulnerable and low-income minority populations, including many children of immigrants. And because of…

Noting that the failures of the U.S. health care system are compounding the problems faced by low-income Americans, Alan Weil argues that any strategy to reduce poverty must provide access to health care for all low-income families. Although nearly all children in families with incomes under 200 percent of poverty are eligible for either Medicaid…

In this paper, the author points out that youth with mental disorders make up a significant subgroup of youth who appear in U.S. juvenile courts. And he notes that juvenile justice systems today are struggling to determine how best to respond to those youths' needs, both to safeguard their own welfare and to reduce re-offending and its…