Support Parents to Ensure Children Thrive

In order to ensure that young children thrive, it is critical to support their families. Parents are key elements in a young child’s healthy development and educational success. Young children need to experience warm, supportive, nurturing relationships with their parents and caregivers – ensuring that families are not struggling with poverty, have access to the services and supports that meet their needs and receive early, strengths-based and culturally appropriate interventions when struggles arise – can help ensure that parents are able to support their children developmentally.  By ensuring that parents are supported - policymakers are taking an important step in ensuring that children are developmentally healthy. 

• Support Family Economic Stability. Poverty poses serious risks to children’s developmental health and is associated with significantly worse life outcomes in adulthood. Research has found that over a third of children experience poverty by the time they reach adulthood and about 10% are poor for at least half of their childhoods.[1] African American children are both much more likely than white children to experience poverty, and are also 7 times more likely to be persistently poor. The children of immigrants are also especially vulnerable since their parents may be exploited by their employers and may be ineligible from participation in programs that reduce poverty among vulnerable families. In Washington State, the Washington Asset Building Coalition works to promote policies and programs that help moderate and low-income families in Washington build, maintain and preserve financial assets through investments in education, savings, homeownership and entrepreneurship.  The coalition, with over 400 members, includes the state’s Departments of Commerce and Financial Institutions, the Office of the Treasurer, and the Division of Child Support; federal agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Federal Reserve Bank; as well as the tribes.
• Ensure Supportive Work and Family Policies. Although the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) guarantees workers leave when they have a child or need to care for a family member due to illness, FMLA only guarantees unpaid leave and only employers with 50 employees or more are required to comply. Many low-income families simply cannot afford to go without income for weeks at a time. Allowing working families the paid leave they need to navigate normal life course events such as the arrival of a child or a significant illness helps to promote family economic stability. Since 2004, California’s Paid Family Leave (PFL) program has assisted families welcoming a new child or caring for a seriously ill family member. Operated much like unemployment insurance, payments are for up to six weeks. An evaluation found that abuse of the policy by employees was rare.[2] Among workers in low-wage jobs (defined as earning less than $20.00 per hour and without health benefits) without employer provided health insurance who used PFL, 84% received at least half of their usual pay and 97% were satisfied with the length of their leave compared with only 31% and 73% respectively among those who did not use PFL. There is also a correlation between use of PFL and higher retention rates among workers in low-wage jobs—83% of those who used PFL returned to the same employer, while only 74% of those not using PFL did so. Among breastfeeding mothers in both high-wage and low-wage jobs, those who used PFL breastfed their babies for twice as many weeks on average as those who did not use PFL, from five to eleven weeks for mothers in high-wage jobs and from five to nine weeks for those in low-wage jobs.[3]
• Support Parental Literacy Efforts. Parental literacy has wide-ranging implication for child well-being, ranging from the ability to help children with their homework to having an impact on a child’s health. Low parental literacy makes it significantly more difficult for parents to access health information and follow medical recommendations. For instance, low parental literacy is associated with a lower standard of asthma care for children.[4] Parental literacy and education programs can help parents achieve educational goals such as getting a GED, improving their English skills or gaining skills to find better employment. The Even Start Family Literacy Program in Texas used a family-centered model that integrated parent literacy and English as a Second Language education with family literacy activities to promote children’s pre-literacy and literacy skills as well as training for parents on how to support their children’s learning process at home and through engagement with the school. Participation in Texas Even Start was associated with significant gains in parental literacy and parenting skills as well as higher rates of reading at or above grade level and promotion to the next grade for children of participants in kindergarten through third grade.[5]
• Support Home Visiting. Home visiting programs can be effective methods of providing child development services and supporting families, including improving child health and development, reducing child abuse and neglect and enhancing parents’ abilities to support their children’s healthy physical and social-emotional development.[6] States can reduce costs by implementing evidence-based home visiting programs, which are also associated with improved outcomes in areas including juvenile arrests, maternal convictions, emergency department use, and cognitive and behavioral problems among children.[7] Using the Healthy Families America model, Virginia has introduced home visiting services at 30 sites statewide. An evaluation of the initiative has found that while 50% of participating mothers reported having been abused as children, the rate of substantiated cases of child maltreatment for their children was less than 1% a year.[8] Moreover, research has shown that Healthy Families America home visiting programs tend to become more successful over time as they become better established so the outcomes in Virginia may improve even further in the future.[9]
• Ensure Supports for Vulnerable Families. Parents’ well-being has far-reaching effects on the well-being of their children. Supporting parents in their efforts to overcome challenges such as mental illness, domestic violence and substance abuse helps to strengthen the protective family circle around young children that nurtures their developmental health. However, many policies designed to benefit young children fail to take these factors into account. The median Medicaid eligibility income threshold for working parents other than pregnant women in 2011 was only 64% of poverty level,[10] resulting in many families where children are covered by Medicaid but the parents are not. This makes it much more difficult for parents to access health care to resolve mental health and substance dependency issues. Exposure to domestic violence is damaging to children’s health, but access to services is often complicated by issues such as geographic isolation, language barriers, ethnic and cultural intolerance, disability, immigration status and lack of appropriate social supports. Effective policies can help parents access the resources they need to ensure their own well-being and that of their children. The ChildFirst initiative in Connecticut uses a home-visiting model to provide wrap-around services to support vulnerable families. Participating parents reported significantly reduced symptoms of depression and parenting-related stress.[11]  ChildFirst has also proven effective in meeting the needs of families affected by domestic violence.[12] The program is associated with high levels of access to community-based services, and parents who had experienced domestic violence reported significant decreases in stress associated with their role as parents and rated the program highly. Children from participating families experienced a significant decrease over time in the number of potentially traumatic events including family violence and significant decreases over time in thoughts and behaviors related to post-traumatic stress.[13]