BUILDing Strong Foundations

Related Posts

• NCIT State Spotlight: Ohio

  Ready, Set, Soar Ohio is a diverse statewide coalition of early childhood, education, health, advocacy, philanthropy, and business organizations, community leaders, policymakers, and families. This coalition is committed to ensuring that more pregnant women, infants, toddlers, and their families have access to the support they need to be ready, set, and soar to their full potential.

• Attention to State Child Care Subsidy Systems Essential to Building the Supply of High-Quality Child Care and Supporting Families with Infants and Toddlers

  Advocates striving to ensure that all families—especially low-income families—have access to high-quality child care for their infants and toddlers should focus on strengthening their state’s core child care assistance system. It is a key determinant of both the quality of care that low-income children receive and their families’ economic stability. States now have a tremendous opportunity to improve their child care assistance policies and make them work better for infants and toddlers and their families, thanks to the historic increase in funding for the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) starting in FY 2018.

• NCIT Spotlight: South Carolina

  Our plan uses infant mental health or the social-emotional well-being of young children as the frame around which we have built our goals for increasing and building quality services for very young children and their families. The thinking behind that is that infant mental health or infants’ social-emotional well-being is really the crux of all other aspects of their health, development, and well-being.

• Infant Mental Health Consultation: A Wise Investment of CCDBG Dollars

  IECMHC builds the capacity of providers and families to understand the powerful influences of infant and toddler relationships, interactions, and environments on the development of babies. Infant-toddler well-being is promoted and mental health problems are prevented or reduced as a result of the consultant’s partnership with adults in young children’s lives. It can also promote emotional and other important skills for infants and young children.

• A Project Years in the Making: Early Childhood and Child Welfare Working Together to Reach the Most Vulnerable Children in Time

  My work centers on children who have been abused, neglected, and traumatized. I have worked in both the child welfare and early childhood systems and have long thought the two should join forces on behalf of these children. But getting the two systems to work collaboratively has always been challenging as they work from different perspectives and often have diverging aims. Child welfare systems are frequently understaffed, and case workers have caseloads composed of variously aged children and differing family conditions that have come to the attention of the child welfare system. Because of the severity of the conditions in which families are often living, children’s lives can be at risk. In a very real sense, child welfare staff have a great sense of urgency about their work, and early childhood’s aim of kindergarten readiness may not seem as pressing.

• Why the Market Can’t Provide an Adequate Child Care Supply and How States Can Help Fill the Gap

  Almost four million babies are born in the United States every year. These infants require diapers, blankets, baby food, and countless other products, creating a large and profitable market for companies meeting this demand. However, the law of supply and demand fails to hold true for perhaps the most essential good for children, high-quality child care. Why does the child care supply fall so short and how can states close the gap and support families?