The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the need for high-quality supports focused on families' health, education, and employment needs. As service delivery organizations have worked to meet these needs, they have been stretched thin. The complex challenges these organizations faced have increased the need for them to engage partners across sectors,…

Rising demand for early help services is currently taking place against a backdrop of closing or reduced services and shrinking public authority budgets across England. Complicating matters is the wide variety of service orientations and differences in assessments offered to vulnerable families. This can be confusing for them. Moreover, this is an…

To promote children's healthy development and give them opportunities to flourish, families need a wide range of support services. These services are often disconnected from each other. Early care and education (ECE) has a particularly fragmented system (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2018). Systems with myriad processes…

Programs that address the needs of low-income parents and children at the same time may hold promise for reducing the transmission of poverty across generations. Contemporary programs of this type address some key weaknesses that may have limited the effectiveness of earlier such approaches, including too little attention paid to the quality,…

Traditional approaches to disseminating research based programs and innovations for children and families, which rely on practitioners and policy makers to make sense of research on their own, have been found insufficient. There is growing interest in strategies that "make it happen" by actively building the capacity of service providers…

Nationally, many resources are spent on programs to ameliorate poor educational and economic outcomes for our children and families, in particular for urban and immigrant families. Programs like the federally funded Head Start, Community Development Block Grants, and thousands of nonprofits across the nation provide out-of-school-time academic and…

The current study examined parents' perspectives of services within a community-based childhood disability program in the process of enhancing the family centeredness of its services. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 39 mothers and 22 fathers approximately 18 months after entering the service delivery system. Parents reported that…

This is the fifth and final report of a longitudinal study examining the use of a comprehensive system of prevention and early intervention services in Palm Beach County, and how its use relates to the outcomes of children and families living in four targeted geographic areas (TGAs) with high rates of poverty, teen pregnancy, crime, and child…

Background: Studies support the use of family-centred practices in service delivery to families where a parent has an intellectual disability. This paper examines the importance of such practices to parents. Materials and Methods: Interview responses from 32 parents with intellectual disability were coded by two independent raters as reflecting…

Extended schools have featured in a range of government policies, promoting integration between education, social services departments and health services, supported by children's trusts, to better meet the needs of children. Legislative changes, and developments such as the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) and the role of the lead professional,…

Research indicates that problems faced by many youngsters and families, such as poverty, inadequate housing, and poor health care and nutrition, are interrelated in complex ways. These problems are often inadequately addressed because of flaws in the social service delivery system. These flaws include a lack of communication between public and…

The Family Support Project in Lansing, Michigan, provides a variety of family support services to help maintain severely mentally and severely multiply impaired children in their own communities, and whenever possible, in their own homes. Services offered include case management, family therapy, respite services, special needs purchases,…

This report presents an evaluation of the Intensive Services Project in Lincoln and McCook, Nebraska, which was designed to demonstrate that caseworkers with smaller child protective caseloads could offer more effective home-based services. The background of the project is described focusing on staffing and service setting. Service principles and…

Draws on interviews with children, birth parents, foster carers, and social workers to explore some of the benefits and pitfalls of foster care. Interview respondents asserted that, in retrospect, coming into care was the best solution to their situation, favored maintaining ties and involvement with birth families, and children often had a…

This fourth document in the Education and Human Services Consortium's Series on Collaboration puts current efforts to create comprehensive and coordinated child and family-serving systems in a 30-year context of related endeavors. Starting from the premise that thinking about ways to structure and improve human services has been clouded by decades…