David McGavock's List: child_welfare

• Facts about child care

   

  What is Kids First?
  Kids First is a childcare resource center operated by the city of Aspen. It is funded through a .45 percent city sales tax, initially passed by Aspen voters in 1990 and renewed until 2038. In addition to providing financial aid to help qualified families with their childcare needs ($441,000 in 2010), the program provides grants to licensed childcare operators for quality improvements, teacher education and accreditation, bus passes and emergency funding. For more information, call 920-5363.
  
  What is CCCAP?
  The Colorado Child Care Assistance Program is a state initiative providing money to counties to assist low-income families with childcare needs. Funding sources for CCCAP are a mixture of federal, state and county dollars. Eligible families also contribute a percentage of the childcare service fees. In Pitkin County, as in many counties across the state, a cap has been placed on the number of families the program can serve and eligibility thresholds have changed. For more information, call 429-2040.
  
  No. of families served through Pitkin CCCAP
  FY 2009: 7
  FY 2010: 9
  FY 2011: 17
  FY 2012: 13*
  (*) Cap on eligible families adopted by Pitkin County commissioners in January 2011.
  Source: Pitkin County Dept. of Health and Human Services

• Colorado has found at least 139 ways to improve the state's troubled child welfare system in the last six years, from better training for caseworkers to more oversight of the 64 counties that each interpret state policy their own way.

  Yet, even with many of those improvements in place, the number of children dying of abuse and neglect is rising — now one kid every 12 days — and so is the percentage of young victims known to child abuse investigators before they end up dead.
• The quality of child welfare in Colorado suffers because the state lacks the power to adequately regulate county departments.
• Colorado doesn't even have the data — caseworkers' workloads and discipline records, for example — to analyze the system's flaws, figure out who is accountable or embark on major improvements.
• Colorado is one of nine states that have county-run child welfare systems.
• Even when a state investigation reveals a policy violation, individual counties, not the state, have authority to discipline caseworkers or supervisors.
• Many counties fought the proposed law, arguing it would cost too much and create more work if their staff had to review every "egregious" act of child abuse, recalled Sen. Lucia Guzman, D-Denver, the bill's sponsor.

• Social workers, the public health system and lawmakers know about a program that doesn't try to fix child abuse after it happens, but tries to prevent it in the first place.

  In the last 35 years, the issue has not been whether the program works. It has been whether to fund it.

  

  Safety blanket.  Allison Wilder, right, of Nurse-Family Partnership visits with Maria Delgado, 20, and her 7-month-old daughter, Kaylee, at their Denver home. During the hour-long visit, they talked about Kaylee's health and development, as well as Delgado's new job, her classes at a community college, and her diet and time management. The partnership, which recruits nurses to visit and mentor moms and mothers-to-be, is used in 400 counties across 41 states, including 52 of Colorado's 64 counties. "A huge part is the relationship (between moms and nurses) - getting in early, before the baby is born, helps build that relationship," Wilder says. "That way the trust is already there, instead of going in after something happens."   (Craig F. Walker, The Denver Post) MORE: View a slideshow of Allison at work.

  The Nurse-Family Partnership identifies pregnant women with characteristics that, statistically, put them and their babies at risk: young, first-time mothers-to-be living in poverty. Some are married, many are not, but all participate voluntarily for two years, starting before their babies are born.

• "Proactive, nonpunitive intervention works," said Dr. Bruce Perry, a researcher in child trauma and founder of the Houston-based ChildTrauma Academy. It costs about $4,500 per mother.

  "But can we get the system to fund this? No," said Perry
• In some parts of the country, child welfare departments have the technology to assign caseworkers and services for families in the same way Starbucks chooses its next coffee shop location or FedEx maps its driving routes.

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• Burkina Faso: Childhoods Lost in the Gold Mines
• On the rocky ground outside the Kollo mining village near the border between Burkina Faso and Ghana, about 100 people are working, 30 or so of them children. They smash boulders into pebbles and pebbles into grit with primitive hammers and sticks. They haul buckets of well water up the hillside and, pouring this water into shallow pans filled with rock and dirt, they swirl the muddy mix, looking in the silt for tiny flecks of gold.
• The United Nations' International Labor Organization estimates that as many as a million children between ages 5 and 17 work in the small-scale gold mines of Africa for as little as $2 a day.
• The U.S. Department of Labor also is funding a four-year, $5 million project in Burkina Faso, one of the world's poorest nations, to reduce child labor in cotton farming and gold mining.
• "We are not calling upon companies to boycott gold that has been mined by children," Kippenberg said, "but to remediate the situation if they find child labor in their supply chain - by engaging the relevant government, their suppliers, and demanding progress to get these children out of the mines and into school."
• The U.S. Labor Department and the ILO consider mining one of the worst forms of child labor because of the risks of injury and death and the long-term health consequences from constant exposure to dust, toxic chemicals, and heavy manual labor.

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• More than 51 percent of the 74 children who originally were diagnosed as preschoolers also were depressed as school-age kids
• Only 24 percent of the 172 children who were not depressed as preschoolers went on to develop depression during their elementary and middle school years.
• But neither a mother with depression nor a conduct disorder in preschool increased the risk for later depression as much as a diagnosis of depression during preschool years.
• The reason it hasn't yet become a huge call to action is because we don't yet have any proven, effective treatments for depressed preschoolers," she explained. "Pediatricians don't usually want to screen for a condition if they can't then refer patients to someone who can help."
• Luby now is testing potential parent-child psychotherapies that appear promising for preschoolers with depression, but it's too early to determine whether they work.
• will continue following this group of children through puberty

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• According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ASD occurs in about 1 in 68 children in the US, and it is five times more common in boys than girls.
• Delayed language onset occurs when a child's first meaningful words come out after 24 months of age, or when their first phrase occurs after 33 months.
• "We need to move beyond investigating average differences in individuals with and without autism, and move towards identifying key dimensions of individual differences within the spectrum."

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• Filming Interactions to Nurture Development (FIND) is a video coaching program that aims to strengthen positive interactions between caregivers and children.

• If an adult’s responses are consistently unreliable, inappropriate, or simply absent, children may experience disruptions to their physical, mental, and emotional health.

   
• FIND coaches film families for 10 minutes as they engage in everyday activities, such as playing a game or having a snack. The coaches then edit down the footage to three brief clips that highlight positive instances of parent-child interaction, and share these with the caregiver in weekly structured coaching sessions.
• streamline the process for sending and receiving video files for analysis, resulting in a far more cost-effective solution that maintained participant confidentiality
• The researchers developed and have employed a protocol for editor certification to ensure the reliability of the edited footage.

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