& 2014 Publ Since its beginning 40 years ago, the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) has recognized that children don’t come in pieces and has pursued a mission to ensure all children a healthy start, a head start, a fair start, a safe start, and a moral start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. So, I am very encouraged to see the Community G...

The Best Practices for Mental Health in Child Welfare Consensus Conference focused on developing guidelines in five key areas (screening and assessment, psychosocial interventions, psychopharmacologic treatment, parent engagement, and youth empowerment) related to children's mental health. This paper provides an overview of issues related to the first three areas, presents the guidelines develo...

Despite a widespread conviction that children ought to be independently represented in child protection court proceedings in the United States, there is little consensus as to what the role of that independent child advocate ought to be or, indeed, who should fulfill that role. This study accomplished three purposes: articulated an aggressive, ambitious and continuous role for the child's repre...

The Latino population represents the fastest growing ethnic minority in the United States. As a result, child welfare agencies need to be prepared to provide culturally appropriate services to Latino families. This paper describes an evaluation of a federally funded initiative designed to train child welfare practitioners in using an existing evidence-based framework--systems of care--with Lati...

Children’s sense of numbers before formal education is thought to rely on an approximate number system based on logarithmically compressed analog magnitudes that increases in resolution throughout childhood. School age children performing a numerical estimation task have been shown to increasingly rely on a formally appropriate, linear representation and decrease their use of an intuitive, loga...

A pilot project providing therapy for families of status-offender youths has proved effective in reducing placements and costs.

Too few poor children who live apart from their fathers can count on their financial support. In 1996, only 30 percent of poor children who lived apart from their dads received child support. That year, welfare reform addressed this hard fact, stepping up efforts to collect child support. But increased child support alone will not be enough; further support, economic incentives, and revised chi...

background: since child abuse and neglect are serious conditions which can potentially lead to inappropriate dental health, we conducted this qualitative study to defi ne the factors infl uencing child abuse and neglect, which lead to oro-facial lesions. materials and methods: qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted by social services employees. purposive sampling was used to recr...