Child Trends

04/21/2026

Adolescents have competing priorities during their after-school time, so program developers and evaluation researchers sometimes struggle to maintain consistent participant attendance. Child Trends’ new blog shares strategies that youth-serving adults can use to keep young people engaged throughout the duration of a voluntary after-school program. These strategies are drawn from the evaluation of Many Ways of Being, an innovative s*x education curriculum—developed by Equimundo and delivered by the Latin American Youth Center as an after-school program to adolescents ages 15-19—that has maintained an attendance rate of 73 percent.

Although our focus was on the MWB s*x education program, we think these strategies are more broadly applicable to youth-serving programs and evaluations and hope they can help other researchers and practitioners develop and refine strategies for keeping youth engaged in after-school curricula.
https://www.childtrends.org/publications/5-lessons-engaging-youth-participants-education-program

04/20/2026

Child Trends applied the Authentic Youth Engagement in Policy Framework, a framework designed to help organizations examine and strengthen their youth engagement, to more than 30 organizations engaging youth in policy efforts around the country. Child Trends’ new brief identifies several strengths and areas for continued growth in organizations' efforts to engage youth. Strengths include:

1. Youth participate in multiple stages of the policy process, and in multiple ways.

2. All the organizations implement organizational practices and provide resources to youth and/or adults to facilitate youth engagement.

3. Authentic youth engagement has spurred progress at the individual, organizational, community, and policy levels.

Areas for growth include expanding opportunities for youth to engage in policy implementation and building staff capacity for authentic youth engagement (e.g., through dedicated time and training). Philanthropic partners can support growth in these areas through targeted funding and capacity building.

Read Cross-Organization Insights on Authentic Youth Engagement in Policy from Child Trends.

04/17/2026

Extended foster care programs provide a variety of supports to young people ages 18 to 21 as they transition out of foster care and into young adulthood. Nearly all states, Washington, DC, Puerto Rico, and nine Tribes have some form of federal- or state-funded extended foster care program. A new Child Trends blog, by Alaina Flannigan, highlights three policies and practices—automatic enrollment, program re-entry after exit before age 21, and robust supportive housing services—that some states have implemented to boost participation and provide these young people with greater access to life skills training and foundational supports.

Read Extended Foster Care Policies and Practices That Boost Young Adults’ Participation from Child Trends.

04/16/2026

Child Trends’ new interactive map shows how Maryland's Child Care Scholarship program helps tens of thousands of families with low incomes access quality-regulated child care each month: On average nearly half of recipients in any given ZIP code use highly rated child care programs. Families can use the scholarships (funded by the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant and the State of Maryland) to help pay licensed child care centers, registered home-based care programs, or informal relative care providers.

Read Map of Maryland Families’ Use of Subsidies on Highly Rated Child Care from Child Trends.

04/15/2026

Most working parents and caregivers in the United States do not have access to paid family and medical leave (PFML) through their employers. As of January 2026, 13 states and Washington, DC have mandatory paid family leave systems to provide PFML to all eligible residents. PFML allows parents and caregivers to take paid time off work to attend to a range of family and caregiving responsibilities, including caring for a newborn, bonding with a new child in their family, or supporting a family member receiving medical treatment. Child Trends’ new resource explores the benefits of PFML policies.
https://www.childtrends.org/publications/mandatory-paid-family-medical-leave-policies

04/14/2026

In 2025, 13 states enacted legislation pertaining to the intersection of youth justice systems and schools. States focused heavily on three areas of policy for improving school safety, education pathways for justice-involved youth, and young people’s transitions from justice facilities back into the community. A new Child Trends blog illustrates these trends by presenting the most common legislative approaches enacted in 2025, offering potential frameworks for balancing school safety, educational opportunity, and successful transitions.

1. Balancing school safety with educational continuity: strengthening safety protocols and clarifying the roles and responsibilities of law enforcement agencies in schools

2. Supporting educational pathways for students with justice involvement: removing barriers to educational success by creating centralized systems to prevent loss of credits and expanding pathways to higher education and career training

3. Streamlining educational transitions and records access: addressing the critical points at which students transition between justice facilities and schools in the community

As state and local leaders consider policies to support court-involved students, they should examine how these policies will address local priorities and capacity.

Read 3 Recent Legislative Trends That Will Shape Education for Youth With Justice Involvement from Child Trends.

04/14/2026

Promising career and technical education (CTE) approaches in youth correctional settings include strong partnerships, labor-market alignment and credential pathways, hands-on learning, and post-release support. A new Child Trends blog—intended for practitioners and system leaders involved in CTE, youth justice education, and youth reentry efforts—identifies existing gaps in the research, highlights promising practices around CTE, and offers reflection questions to help youth corrections facility administrators introduce young people to career pathways and better prepare them for future success.

Read Promising Practices for Career and Technical Education in Youth Correctional Settings from Child Trends.

04/13/2026

Ensuring that children experience safe, stable, and family-based homes is a shared priority across the child welfare field and a central focus of the federal A Home for Every Child initiative. Child Trends’ new resource examines what current federal data can and cannot tell us about children’s experiences in the child welfare system and highlights opportunities to strengthen measurement. To organize this discussion, the resource focuses on three key decisions that shape whether children experience safe and stable homes:
1. Are children who experience maltreatment able to remain safely with their families?
2. When removal is necessary, are children placed with kin or in other family-based settings?
3. Do children in foster care experience safety, stability, and timely permanency?
Together, these three areas of decision making reflect how system-level policies and capacities shape children’s day-to-day experiences of safety, stability, and permanency.
https://www.childtrends.org/publications/current-data-help-measure-progress-home-for-every-child

04/10/2026

From October 2024 to May 2025, Vermont families participating in the child care subsidy program spent about 5% of their income on child care, according to a Child Trends brief that explores the effects of Vermont’s recent policy changes on families’ child care cost burden. These changes have expanded families’ access to child care subsidies while making care more affordable for families with lower incomes. Understanding how much families pay for child care can help states and territories design family payment structures that offer better access to care for families with lower incomes while expanding eligibility to families with higher incomes.

Read Vermont’s Child Care Subsidy Program Expands Access and Reduces Cost from Child Trends.

04/08/2026

A new Child Trends analysis of federal foster care data shows that, nationally, 30% of U.S. children living in foster care were in kinship care and that states vary widely in their use of formal kinship care placements. Studies show that kinship care—an arrangement in which a child lives with relatives or close family friends when their parents are unable to provide a safe home—helps children stay connected to family, culture, and community while supporting their emotional well-being, academic success, and healing from trauma. Over the past 20 years, federal funding and regulations have increasingly promoted kinship care, but each state is responsible for instituting its own kinship care policies—including eligibility and licensing requirements and financial support for kinship caregivers—resulting in a wide range of policies across the country.
https://www.childtrends.org/publications/data-reveal-variation-states-formal-kinship-care

04/07/2026

Researchers need strong enrollment numbers to rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of their programs, but they often face challenges in recruiting youth into voluntary after-school programs. Child Trends’ new blog post shares five key lessons for recruiting and enrolling adolescents in voluntary programs, drawn from our evaluation of Many Ways of Being (MWB)—an innovative s*x education curriculum developed by Equimundo and delivered by the Latin American Youth Center as an after-school program to adolescents ages 15-19.

Although MWB is a s*x education program, the following strategies are more broadly applicable to youth-serving programs and evaluations, particularly in after-school settings. We hope they can help other researchers and practitioners develop and refine effective strategies for youth recruitment.
https://www.childtrends.org/publications/strategies-recruiting-youth-after-school-programs

04/06/2026

If you’re focused on equity, you know that access to ECE is about more than increasing the number of slots in care. Rather, it’s about designing systems that give families meaningful choices—options that match their schedules, cultures, budgets, and hopes for their children. The ECE Access Center can partner with you to make equitable access a reality.

Opening doors for families by strengthening early childhood systems. Vision: Our vision is that every family is able to access high-quality early care and education that meets their needs and helps t