Related UI Researchers

Publications on Children

When youth in the child welfare system face problems such as juvenile delinquency, the agencies charged with their care often find that they do not have the capacity to act without the cooperation of other government departments. The trap gets tighter when parents have lost custody or are in the criminal justice system themselves. Such scenarios frustrate staff in government agencies and cause vulnerable youth to lose confidence in the system just when they need it the most. Child Welfare: The Challenges of Collaboration highlights several scenarios requiring interagency collaboration and also includes an evaluation of Project Confirm, a cross-agency effort to help foster children in juvenile detention. Though the challenges of collaboration will be difficult to solve, this book offers practical examples to guide child welfare service agencies.

Teen childbearing in the United States has been declining since 1991, yet we consistently have the highest teen birth rates in the industrialized world. In 1997, Kids Having Kids was the first comprehensive effort to identify the consequences of teen childbearing for the mothers, the fathers, the children, and our society. Rather than simply comparing teen mothers with their childless counterparts, the assembled researchers achieved a new methodological sophistication, seeking to isolate the birth itself from the mother’s circumstances and thus discover its true costs. This updated second edition features a new chapter evaluating teen pregnancy interventions, along with revised and updated versions of most first edition chapters.

Workplace policies that provide flexible scheduling, leave for caregiving, and assistance with child care likely benefit employers in recruitment, retention, productivity, and health care costs. Their benefits to employees seem obvious. Researchers, however, are just beginning to move beyond correlational, descriptive studies into rigorous intervention research. These new investigations examine not only the effects of formal policies-whether federal law or company HR initiatives-but also changes in workplace culture. Work-Life Policies assembles a diverse group of commentators-industrial psychologists, labor organizers, policy analysts, management scholars, organizational psychologists, and others-to offer fresh ideas and new insight.

Dramatic changes in the American family have transformed the way we care for its oldest and youngest members. Nuclear families have become smaller as childbearing has declined, but extended families have become larger as life expectancy grows. Divorce, extramarital childbearing, cohabitation, and remarriage, have increased our number of kin but often complicate relationships and diffuse responsibility for care. In Intergenerational Caregiving, an interdisciplinary group of scholars considers our changing family relationships and their effect on social policies. Caregiving and its effects on families’ relationships and resources are examined from economic, sociological, anthropological and psychological perspectives, and chapters on both elders and children with disabilities are included.

This study explores the link between community risk factors and childhood obesity using data on child obesity from the 1988-1994 National Health and Examination Survey, the 2002-2004 National Medical Expenditures Survey, and the 2003-2004 National Survey of Children's Health, combined with data on community characteristics from a wide variety of sources. Multivariate models that relate child obesity to the characteristics of the child's community are used to predict the "risk of childhood obesity" for communities in the United States. The report includes maps and community profiles for 50 states and the District of Columbia.