Measuring kindergarten readiness is essential to identifying children who would benefit from additional supports, either in kindergarten or in the years before kindergarten entry. Several measures of kindergarten readiness are in use now by states and researchers. Most assess individual children at the time they enter kindergarten, using teachers…

Because families are the first nurturers and educators of their children, it is helpful for policymakers and other stakeholders to understand how family characteristics, the activities in which families engage, and their neighborhood circumstances are associated with preschool children's health and readiness for learning. The analyses presented in…

Teen childbearing is associated with negative outcomes for teen parents, their children, and society. Teen mothers are more likely to be poor as adults, and are more likely to rely on public assistance, compared with women who delay childbearing. Children born to young mothers have poorer educational, behavioral, and health outcomes throughout…

Research indicates that educational, economic, and life success reflect children's nonacademic as well as academic competencies. Therefore, longitudinal surveys that assess educational progress and success need to incorporate nonacademic measures to avoid omitted variable bias, inform development of new intervention strategies, and support…

In recent years, the education field has come to recognize the role of schools in supporting student health, safety, and well-being by developing integrated student support initiatives. These offer specific services and supports to students and their families to build a foundation for academic success. These initiatives, referred to as community…

Children and youth who participate in out-of-school-time (OST) programming are more likely than their non-participating peers to do well in school, get sufficient physical exercise, and avoid involvement in risky behaviors. However, there are concerns that there are inequities in access to OST programs, particularly for those from lower-income…

Child Trends has been asked by the Annie E. Casey Foundation to identify key opportunities that a new Administration might pursue to improve the capacity of the federal statistical system to monitor child and youth well-being. In this paper the authors discuss a number of areas of opportunity, offering concrete steps that can be taken, generally…

Longitudinal indicators are measures of an individual or family behavior, interaction, attitude, or value that are assessed consistently or comparably across multiple points in time and cumulated over time. Examples include the percentage of time a family lived in poverty or the proportion of childhood a person lived in a single-parent family.…

When Congress reformed the welfare system in 1996, major goals of the legislation were to increase employment and income of needy families and to decrease child poverty. Another major goal was to improve child outcomes through increased parental employment and earnings along with other provisions of welfare reform. However, there was also concern…

Research studies based on statistics for the United States as a whole have documented differences in child and family well-being between children in low-income families and children in more affluent families and between children in single-parent families and children in two-parent families. However, researchers have not explored differences in…

This paper uses recent data on U.S. children from the National Survey of America's Families (NSAF) to create indices that tally the number of problems or risks that individual children experience. We compare results with those from indices developed elsewhere that assess the change across sets of population-level indicators. While the two types of…

Despite the widespread use and acceptance of indicators in so many fields, this research method tends to be underutilized in the broader social policy arena. One reason may be the haziness that exists about how social indicators differ from other types of research in the social sciences. In addition policy makers may have little or no knowledge of…

Given the increase in statistical information on the well-being of America's children during the past decade, Child Trends sought to find out how well public perception matches official statistics on the characteristics and well being of America's children. Three public opinion polls were designed to ascertain the public's understanding of the…

The number of U.S. children living in poverty increased in 2007--continuing an upward trend dating back to 2000: in 2007, 13.3 million children were living in poverty, up from 11.6 million children in 2000. The percentage of children living in families with incomes below the poverty line has increased from 16.2 percent in 2000 to 18.0 percent in…

In this Research-to-Results Brief, the author discusses the importance for policymakers, taxpayers, and the media to recognize the diversity in children's circumstances, because this recognition affects the number of children believed to need varied services and the magnitude of the challenge of meeting that need. Many researchers have developed…