CFK Weekly— Nov. 12, 2002

We encourage distribution of this information! If reprinting in whole or part, please attribute it to Connect for Kids (www.connectforkids.org).

NEW ON CONNECT FOR KIDS

**Foster Care with a Changed Focus
**Violence Prevention: You Can Never Start Too Early

PUBLIC EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY
**Public Education: An American Idea-and Ideal
**Public Education's Past
**Family Disadvantage Persists Across Generations

PARENTING AND CAREGIVING
**Parent-Teen Intervention May Reduce Teen Driving Risk
**Spanking Has Its Place, but Not in School, Say Parents
**More About Spanking and Corporal Punishment
**Personal Safety for Children: A Guide for Parents
**FosterParentNet

RESOURCE-POOR FAMILIES
**It Takes Real Money to Raise a Child
**Owning Up
**Take Action with RESULTS

WEAKNESS IN WELFARE REFORM
**Poor Children in Single-Parent Families Have Fewer Supports After Welfare Reform
**Welfare Caseloads Continue to Decline
**States Spending More on TANF
**Mothers' Beliefs About Welfare Rules

THINGS TO DO!
**Millions of Americans Willing to Mentor
** National Inclusive Schools Week, December 2-6, Toolkit
**Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids
**Brain Power! The National Institute on Drug Abuse Junior Scientist Program
**Paving the Way for Vulnerable and Out-of-School Youth Audioconference
**Leaders for a Changing World
**Future of Children Hosts Online Discussion on Kids and Guns

EDUCATIONAL READING!
**Uncle Sam Wants You!

CHILDREN'S MENTAL HEALTH
**The Demons of Childhood
**Interim Report to the President

LATINOS-THE LARGEST MINORITY
**Latinos Largest Minority-Voting Clout
**The Latino Population and the Latino Electorate: The Numbers Differ
**National Survey of Latinos: The Latino Electorate
**On the Latino Agenda
**Adaptation to US Culture Leads to Worse Nutrition

FOCUS ON THE STATES
**State by State Election Results
**State by State News

SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE

NEW ON CONNECT FOR KIDS

**Foster Care with a Changed Focus
Relations between foster parents and the birth parents of the children they care for often range from guarded to downright hostile. A pilot program in New Hampshire puts both sets of adults to work achieving shared goals: keeping families together, and making sure kids have safe, stable and permanent homes. Phyllis Ring describes Permanency Plus.
http://www.connectforkids.org/content1552/content_show.htm?attrib_id=309&doc_id=130387

**Violence Prevention: You Can Never Start Too Early
Research shows that violence is learned, and often it's learned in the early stages of life. A new program called ACT (Adults and Children Together) Against Violence aims to help adults show kids through their own actions how to behave positively and avoid violence.
http://www.connectforkids.org/newsletter-url1570/newsletter-url_show.htm?doc_id=130860

PUBLIC EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY

**Public Education: An American Idea-and Ideal
Public education was this democracy's greatest achievement and its bedrock, argues Hodding Carter III in this Public Education Network column. The idea that education should open doors of opportunity to all, not just the privileged, is a revolutionary idea that nurtures our democracy, and needs nurturing itself to keep practice in line with the ideal.
http://www.publiceducation.org/news/demobedrock.asp

**Public Education's Past
Historian N. Ray Hiner describes how the concept of public education gained widespread public support in the 19th century, and how these lessons from history can inform today's debates.
http://www.connectforkids.org/resources3139/resources_show.htm?doc_id=18828

**Family Disadvantage Persists Across Generations
Despite the ideal that public schools should offer opportunity to all, in practice children with different backgrounds do not do equally well. This Programme for International Student Assessment report provides some clues for assessing to what extent the discrepancy is because of home influences and to what extent it is because of experiences at school. According to the analysis, parental occupation is strongly associated with school performance, and patterns of communication between parents and children are associated with educational success. The socio-economic composition of a school's student population can be an even stronger predictor of student performance than individual home background. The report finds that family disadvantage will remain from generation to generation unless education systems take steps to mitigate its effect.
http://www.pisa.oecd.org/knowledge/summary/h.htm

PARENTING AND CAREGIVING

**Parent-Teen Intervention May Reduce Teen Driving Risk
An NICHD program that teaches parents how to set limits on their teens' driving greatly reduces the teens' chances of risky driving behavior that could lead to accidents, according to a recent study by researchers at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).
http://www.nichd.nih.gov/new/releases/driving_risk.cfm

**Spanking Has Its Place, but Not in School, Say Parents
According to an ABCNEWS poll, the public approves of spanking children in principle by a 2-1 margin, and half of parents say they sometimes spank their own kids. But an overwhelming majority disapproves of corporal punishment in schools. Southerners and parents with less education are more likely to approve of spanking at home and at school than others.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/spanking_poll021108.html

**More About Spanking and Corporal Punishment
You'll find resources about age-appropriate discipline on the Connect for Kids Web site. http://www.connectforkids.org/resources3139/resources_list.htm?attrib_id=263&doc_id=82331.

Connect for Kids Managing Editor Julee Newberger described the efforts of advocates to ban school corporal punishment (http://www.connectforkids.org/resources3139/resources_show.htm?doc_id=55474) and about a coalition that formed to fight corporal punishment in foster families-scroll to Birth of a Coalition.
http://www.connectforkids.org/resources3139/resources_show.htm?doc_id=72802

**Personal Safety for Children: A Guide for Parents
This U.S. Department of Education booklet has tips for what parents can tell their children and what they can do to protect their children from abduction and exploitation.
http://www.nochildleftbehind.gov/parents/safety/index.html

**FosterParentNet
FosterParentNet tries to expand the network of support groups and other resources for foster parents: mini grants for new and innovative start-up support groups, training workshops for facilitators who will train others on support group recruitment, leadership and facilitation, a best practices manual and video for starting a foster parent support group and online discussion boards and e-mail listserv for foster parents.
http://www.fosterparentnet.org/

RESOURCE-POOR FAMILIES

**It Takes Real Money to Raise a Child
For the United States as a whole, child-rearing expense estimates ranged between $9,030 and $10,140 for a child in a middle-income two-child, married-couple family, according to the 2002 USDA annual report "Expenditures on Children by Families."

Child care costs for infants and toddlers under age 2 were the second highest child-rearing expense for all income levels, after housing. For every age category, the widest disparities in spending levels among income-groups were for child care and education expenses, with high-income families spending two to three times more than low-income families. High-income families, for example, spent almost 2.5 times as much on child care for 0-2 year-olds ($2090) as low-income families ($840). High-income families spent twice as much as middle-income families, and four times as much as low-income families, on educational expenses for their 15 to 17-year-olds.
http://www.usda.gov/cnpp/using2.htm

**Owning Up
Most of America's working poor are still unable to accumulate even the most minimal of assets. Even when they are getting by, they lack many of the resources-tangible and intangible-that provide middle-class Americans with a sense of security, stability, and a stake in the future. This Brookings Institution report explores how asset-building programs, used in combination with traditional income-based support, can be an effective means for helping millions of American out of poverty.
http://www.brook.edu/dybdocroot/press/books/owning_up.htm

**Take Action with RESULTS
RESULTS, the grass-roots action group, says while state funding for child care is being cut, the federal government has not yet taken steps to protect and expand critical funding help to the states and families for child care supports.
http://results.org/website/article.asp?id=558

WEAKNESS IN WELFARE REFORM

**Poor Children in Single-Parent Families Have Fewer Supports After Welfare Reform
Child poverty rates have dropped, but for those still living in poverty, this is little consolation, as the amount of public assistance for very low-income families with young children has declined as well. Since welfare reform, the most disadvantaged of impoverished children have slipped deeper into poverty compared to pre-welfare reform, according to this IWPR Research-in-Brief. The report argues that the poorest children are suffering the most from the caseload reduction focus of the 1996 welfare reform legislation. Poor children living in single-parent families-both those who were quite poor and extremely poor-were less likely to receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Medicaid, and food stamps in 2000 than in 1996.

The situation for the youngest children, who are most likely to be extremely poor, worsened after welfare reform. Prior to welfare reform, children younger than six were more likely to receive cash assistance than their school-aged counterparts. In 2000, however, children younger than six were the least likely to be covered by TANF. The share of young children in extreme poverty in families receiving TANF dropped by nearly three-fifths (from 61 percent to 26 percent). Among older children in extreme poverty, coverage fell by two-fifths (from 57 percent to 33 percent).
http://www.iwpr.org/pdf/d451.pdf

**Welfare Caseloads Continue to Decline
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has announced that the number of families receiving assistance under the TANF program declined 3.6 percent between December 2001 and June 2002, to roughly 2 million families or 5 million people.
http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2002pres/20021101.html

**States Spending More on TANF
States have used reserve funds to supplement their annual federal TANF block grants to help low-income parents find jobs and provide child care assistance and other work supports, according to this Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of Treasury data. In fiscal year 2002, states spent $18.7 billion in federal TANF funds, $2.2 billion more than they received from the basic block grant and $1.6 billion more than their total TANF funding. Reserves of unspent funds have now dwindled, however, and many states will not be able to maintain their current TANF spending levels over the next couple of years. Some states already have made cuts in TANF-funded programs.
http://www.cbpp.org/10-30-02wel.htm

**Mothers' Beliefs About Welfare Rules
Only one in three mothers using welfare know that two-parent families are eligible for public assistance, but there is no correlation between their understanding of the rules regarding marriage and their decisions about marriage or cohabitation, reports this Fragile Families Research Brief.
http://crcw.princeton.edu

THINGS TO DO!

**Millions of Americans Willing to Mentor
Two and a half million young people are in formal mentoring relationships, but some 15 million teens are still waiting for mentors. According to the latest National Mentoring Poll, 57 million adults say they would seriously consider becoming a mentor. The poll's findings suggest effective recruitment strategies include targeting adults under age 45, working through organizations like schools and churches, offering scheduling and other choices, providing training and guidance and offering online mentoring as an option.
http://www.mentoring.org

**National Inclusive Schools Week, December 2-6, Toolkit
National Inclusive Schools Week provides an opportunity for schools across the nation to celebrate the diverse abilities of all members of the school community, and the progress that has been made in providing equal educational opportunities for all learners, particularly those with disabilities. Last year Philadelphia's Hartranft Elementary School held a Diversity Carnival where students created poems, performed dances, signed
songs, and dined on a multicultural feast. Chicago Public Schools created window displays about inclusive practices in central office buildings. You'll find other ideas and tools in the National Inclusive Schools Week toolkit.
http://www.edc.org/urban/nisw02.htm#kit

**Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids
The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids has launched an online campaign in
an effort to raise the level of attention paid to tobacco issues. The
campaign urges governors, U.S. members of Congress and other officials to make tobacco prevention a priority.
http://www.kidsbeforeprofits.org
The Spanish version is at http://tfk.grassroots.com/tfk_candidateEd/CandidateEd_Home_spanish/

**Brain Power! The National Institute on Drug Abuse Junior Scientist Program
These new curriculum materials for second- and third-grade students on the brain and the effects of drugs on the brain are designed to lay the foundation for future scientific learning and substance abuse prevention efforts by providing an early elementary school-age audience with a basis of knowledge and critical thinking skills.
http://www.drugabuse.gov/JSP/JSP.html

**Paving the Way for Vulnerable and Out-of-School Youth Audio Conference
The National League of Cities audioconference, to be held on November 20 12:30 (ET), is for municipal and community leaders, youth specialists directors, and others interested in how community programs and policies can provide positive options for vulnerable youth-the five million 16 to 24-year-olds who have lost their way, are unemployed and uneducated, and often in foster care and/or in trouble with the law. E-mail your name, title, organization, mailing address (including street, city, state, and zip), e-mail, phone, and fax to reid@nlc.org by November 18.

**Leaders for a Changing World
If your community has an outstanding leader who is tackling tough social problems with effective, systemic solutions, you may have an appropriate candidate to nominate to be a Leader for a Changing World. Deadline: January 7, 2003.
http://leadershipforchange.org/nomination/

**Future of Children Hosts Online Discussion on Kids and Guns
Each year, millions of children and teenagers participate in programs designed to teach them to stay away from or behave responsibly around guns. Many parents also receive education about how to keep their children safe from unsupervised access to guns. But these kinds of programs have not shown great success in reducing youth gun violence. Are there ways to improve these programs? Should policymakers, educators, and parents be looking at other approaches to reducing youth gun accidents, suicides, and homicides? Read some answers or pose your own question to Dr. Marjorie S. Hardy in this online discussion hosted by the Packard Foundation.
http://www.futureofchildren.org/newsletter2861/newsletter_show.htm?doc_id=129301

Check out events and activities on the Connect for Kids calendar.
http://www.connectforkids.org/calendar1569/calendar.htm

EDUCATIONAL READING!

**Uncle Sam Wants You!
There has been a lot of attention to the testing and other accountability measures in the new No Child Left Behind education act, but did you know the legislation includes a measure requiring high schools to provide contact information for all their students to military recruiters? David Goodman's "No Child Unrecruited" reports in Mother Jones.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2002/45/ma_153_01.html

CHILDREN'S MENTAL HEALTH

**The Demons of Childhood
Young brains break. Then comes the broken care system, reports Marianne Szegedy-Maszak in U.S. News & World Report. The symptoms of a "broken care system"-misdiagnosis, revolving medications, lack of beds and uncooperative insurance-compound the difficulties of the estimated one in five children and teens with a diagnosable psychiatric disorder in the U.S.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/021111/health/11kids.htm

**Interim Report to the President
Nearly 7 to 9 percent of all children (ages 9 to 17) have a serious emotional disturbance, which means there are one or two kids with serious emotional problems in virtually every classroom, according to this report from the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health. This report addresses mental health issues associated with children, adults, older adults and suicide prevention and highlights a variety of model programs that address the mental health needs of children and adolescents.
http://www.mentalhealthcommission.gov/reports/interim_toc.htm

LATINOS – THE LARGEST MINORITY

**Latinos Largest Minority-Voting Clout
A National Council of La Raza (NCLR) election analysis reports that Latinos will have at least 23 members in the U.S. House of Representatives, an all-time high. Latino voters helped defeat Colorado's anti-bilingual education initiative and approve Florida's initiative to reduce class sizes. NCLR warns that the Latino community's growing voter clout should not be taken for granted by either party, nor by candidates who do outreach but appear indifferent or worse to Latino concerns, as evidenced in the "hemorrhaging of Latino support for Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in California."
http://nclr.policy.net/proactive/newsroom/release.vtml?id=21960

**The Latino Population and the Latino Electorate: The Numbers Differ
The nation's 35 million Hispanics comprise nearly 13 percent of the population. The Hispanic electorate is emerging as a distinct presence on the political landscape, but the number of Latino voters is limited because a significant proportion of the Hispanic population is ineligible to vote and less than half of eligible voters typically go to the polls, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Call 800- 656- 4533 for this fact sheet.

**National Survey of Latinos: The Latino Electorate
A survey of Latino voters found that 45 percent identify as Democrats and 20 percent as Republican, but the Democratic advantage disappears in a choice between confidence in President Bush or Democrats in Congress. Latinos support a larger government and are willing (55 percent) to pay higher taxes to support more government services, but generally have more conservative social views.
http://www.pewhispanic.org/page.jsp?page=reports#default

**On the Latino Agenda
Thousands of students across the country who lack legal immigration status because their parents brought them to this country as young children find that the door to financial aid for college is shut. The DREAM Act would allow states the flexibility to give these students access to in-state tuition without a federal penalty, and would provide a path to legal status and eventually the workforce, once students graduate.
http://nclr.policy.net/proactive/newsroom/release.vtml?id=21440

Latino families are the least likely to have health insurance. The Immigrant Children's Health Improvement Act (ICHIA) would lift the current ban barring children and pregnant woman from critical federal health services because they are legal immigrants who arrived in the U.S. after August 22, 1996. This measure could be considered as part of reauthorizing Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
http://nclr.policy.net/proactive/newsroom/release.vtml?id=21720

**Adaptation to U.S. Culture Leads to Worse Nutrition
With every successive generation after immigration to the U.S., Latino children are increasingly likely to eat a less healthy diet, abandoning the traditional fruits, beans and vegetables for a high-fat cuisine, according to a report by researchers at New York University. Children who ate the most nutritious foods were first-generation immigrants between 2 and 5 years old, while those with the least healthy diets tended to be third-generation teenagers.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_10085.html

FOCUS ON THE STATES

**State by State Election Results
The November 5 election results rearranged the political landscape in 46 of the 50 states. Stateline.org has results of state legislature elections and thumbnail biographies of the winners of the 36 governors' races.
http://www.stateline.org/story.do?storyId=269992
http://www.stateline.org/story.do?storyId=269773

**State by State News

California
Rand's "Countywide Evaluation of the Long-Term Family Self-Sufficiency Plan: Assessing the Utility of the LTFSS Plan Service Delivery and Planning Framework" concludes that the framework is a useful planning tool for the county, but that its use in implementation and evaluation is more complicated.
http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1563/

Illinois
The Emergency Campaign for a Fair Budget reports on the impact of budget cuts to human services in Illinois over the past five years. http://www.workwelfareandfamilies.org

About one-third of the current and former TANF recipients in Illinois had difficulty feeding their families, according to the first two annual Illinois Families Study surveys (in 1999-2000 and 2001). The increased demand for emergency food assistance and other forms of informal support indicate a possible trend towards growing food insecurity in the future, but the study found that families who consistently receive food stamps had reduced risk of food insecurity.
http://www.northwestern.edu/ipr/research/foodinsecurity.pdf

New York
While recruiting and retaining good foster parents is key to quality services for children in the child welfare system, many agencies lack a systematic strategy for identifying and supporting foster parents. Based on a business model approach to needs assessment and intervention, Circles of Support in New York City are an attempt to fill the gap for foster parent families.
http://www.circleofsupport.org/about.htm

Virginia
Virginia's budget deficit is jeopardizing programs for families and children, including a proven home visiting program, Healthy Families Virginia, which offers comprehensive support to vulnerable parents.

Without secure state funding, Healthy Families Virginia will confront devastating setbacks. With the looming budget cuts in December, an additional 15 percent cut is expected. Advocates and supporters continue to wait for the outcome in the coming months.
http://www.naco.org/pubs/cnews/current/Articles/14Budget.html

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http://www.connectforkids.org/information1537/information_show.htm?doc_id=9207

Keep up the hard work, everyone!

Jan Richter, Policy and Outreach Specialist, and the Connect for Kids team
Jan@benton.org