Mandatory reporting is the first step in a troubling and common cascade: Poverty, reframed as "neglect," precipitates far too many reports, with roughly one-third of children enduring a CPS investigation. Investigated families are monitored and coerced to change their parenting (usually without support for alleviating their poverty),…

Consultation in infant mental health is a relationship-based approach to building reflective capacity in professionals who work with young children. Consultants support various professionals such as child care and medical providers with meeting the social, emotional, and developmental needs of infants and children. This article describes a…

Based on case studies in three states (CO, RI, and TX), this brief examines promising strategies to address the developmental and mental health needs of infants and toddlers involved in Child Welfare (CW). Due to family adversities, trauma, maltreatment, and separation from primary caregivers, these infants and toddlers are at substantial risk of…

In 2021, Baby's Space became a Community Resource Hub. Funded by Minnesota's federally-funded Preschool Development Grant (PDG), the Community Resource Hubs help pregnant and parenting families with children under age 9 connect with needed resources. Baby's Space: A Place to Grow is a child development center that works to create a cycle of…

Weakening federal assistance programs that provide children with affordable health care, nutritious food, stable housing, and early childhood education by imposing funding cuts, work requirements, unreasonable time limits, and other unnecessary bureaucratic barriers undermines access to services for low income families and undercuts opportunities…

Increasing numbers of young children are now routinely screened for developmental delays during well-child visits in primary care settings which support early identification of developmental delays. Unfortunately, research indicates that there is often a gap between the number of children who receive an abnormal screen and the number who…

Nutrition insecurity is especially seen among historically underserved populations, such as those with limited financial resources. Funded by the USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and conducted by Cooperative Extension through land-grant institutions in all U.S. states and territories and the District of Columbia, the…

How do we screen all families in a population at a single time point, identify family-specific risks, and connect each family with evidence-based community resources that can help them overcome those risks--an approach known as targeted universalism? In this article, Kenneth A. Dodge and W. Benjamin Goodman describe Family Connects, a program…

This article describes an infant and early childhood mental health-informed therapeutic visitation program that offers clinical support, systems-level advocacy, and developmentally appropriate guidance to families navigating the child welfare and family court systems. The program offers treatment, permanency, and placement planning for infants,…

The ParentChild+ Program was created more than 50 years ago and has provided thousands of at-risk families across America with positive outcomes. Originally known as the Mother-Child Home Program and later, Parent-Child Home Program, the model is home visiting, reaching families affected by poverty and societal hardships. This article describes…

Historically, Maori children in New Zealand have been consistently over-represented in negative social statistics. To describe the current status of New Zealand's education and services for at-risk Maori children and their families, this article highlights the country's overall structure of special education and services, as well as unique…

ParentChild+ is a national home visiting program dedicated to bridging the opportunity gap for families in marginalized communities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the program worked more closely than ever with families and family care providers with young children to ensure they had the necessary tools and resources to support their children to…

Evidence-based home visiting programs exist in over half of the counties in the United States. Because home visiting programs aim to improve the health, education, and life circumstances of pregnant mothers and their children, they are a critical piece of the early childhood landscape. However, the data collected about these programs are siloed,…

A half century ago, relatively few US children experienced the incarceration of a parent. In the decades since, incarceration rates rose rapidly (before leveling off more recently), and today a historically unprecedented number of children are exposed to parental incarceration. In this article, Kristin Turney and Rebecca Goodsell review the…

The Baby Leadership Learning Collaborative (Baby LLC) initiative is a leadership group committed to bridging relationships across service sectors to promote infant-early childhood mental health and to break the multigenerational cycle of risk often associated with early adversity and trauma. Baby LLC has guided an early relational health focus…