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While text-message based interventions that target parents and older students have shown promise for improving a variety of outcomes, evidence on text-based outreach and support for new parents is just emerging. We explore programmatic data from a text-based mentoring intervention designed to support new mothers and promote healthy child development. We coded 18,897 text messages from 162 mother-mentor pairs to describe the characteristics of interactions between new mothers and their text-based mentors.

Despite their potentially central role in fostering school readiness, executive function (EF) skills have received little explicit attention in the design and evaluation of school readiness interventions for socioeconomically disadvantaged children. The present study examined a set of five EF measures in the context of a randomized-controlled trial of a research-based intervention integrated into Head Start programs (Head Start REDI). Three hundred fifty-six 4-year-old children (17% Hispanic, 25% African American; 54% girls) were followed over the course of the prekindergarten year.

Purpose: The purposes of the study were to describe baseline data in the implementation of evidence-based clinical practices among health center partners as part of a community-wide teen pregnancy prevention initiative and to identify opportunities for health center improvement.

New evidence from neuroscience, psychology, and other behavioral sciences suggests that TANF programs may be able to improve participants’ outcomes by applying the science of self-regulation. Self-regulation refers to a foundational set of skills and personality factors that enable people to control their thoughts, emotions, and behavior. It is what helps people set goals, make plans, solve problems, reason, organize, prioritize, initiate tasks, manage time, and persist in and monitor their actions.

U.S. children are more likely to live apart from a biological parent than at any time in history. Although the Child Support Enforcement system has tremendous reach, its policies have not kept pace with significant economic, demographic, and cultural changes. Narrative analysis of in-depth interviews with 429 low-income noncustodial fathers suggests that the system faces a crisis of legitimacy. Visualization of language used to describe all forms child support show that the formal system is considered punitive and to lead to a loss of power and autonomy.

Relations of duration and developmental timing of poverty to children's development from birth to age 9 were examined by comparing children from families who were never poor, poor only during the child's infancy (0-3 years of age), poor only after infancy (4-9 years of age), and chronically poor. Chronically poor families provided lower quality childrearing environments, and children in these families showed lower cognitive performance and more behavior problems than did other children.

The Children’s Bureau funded a multi-phase grant program referred to as Youth At-Risk of Homelessness (YARH) to build the evidence base on what works to prevent homelessness among youth and young adults who have been involved in the child welfare system. To date, there is very little evidence on how to meet the needs of this population.

Child care quality plays a crucial role in children's social and cognitive development. While child care quality is a critical issue for all children, it matters more for low-income children. Policy makers have increased the emphasis on allowing parents, not government, to make decisions about the type of care they want for their children. Yet most research on child care quality has focused on how child care professionals, not parents define high quality care.

To help individuals successfully reenter society after time in jail, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) awarded $10 million in grants to 20 local workforce development boards (LWDBs) in June 2015 for the Linking to Employment Activities PreRelease (LEAP) initiative. Central to the LEAP initiative was creating jail-based American Job Centers (AJCs) with direct linkages to community-based AJCs.

Forty-four Head Start classrooms were randomly assigned to enriched intervention (Head Start REDI—Research-based, Developmentally Informed) or ‘‘usual practice’’ conditions. The intervention involved brief lessons, ‘‘handson’’ extension activities, and specific teaching strategies linked empirically with the promotion of: (a) social-emotional competencies and (b) language development and emergent literacy skills. Take-home materials were provided to parents to enhance skill development at home.