This American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) Services Snapshot summarizes key data on demographics and services for children from birth to age five and pregnant women served by all AIAN programs. The data in this Snapshot is a subset of the annual Program Information Report (PIR) submission to the Office of Head Start. Data categories include:…

Young children in the child welfare system are inherently vulnerable to disruptions in early attachment, and abrupt changes of placement can function as trauma triggers. In this article, the authors present a case from a Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP) Learning Collaborative which exemplifies the potential trauma of placement changes, and how CPP…

Decades of research and clinical observations have demonstrated the harmful effects of parent-child separation on children's short- and long-term well-being (Society for Research in Child Development, 2018). Young children may be separated from their parents due to a variety of circumstances. This article provides recommendations for the…

The use of theory-driven models to develop and evaluate family-based intervention programs has a long history in psychology. Some of the first evidence-based parenting programs to address child problem behavior, developed in the 1970s, were grounded in causal models derived from longitudinal developmental research. The same translational…

Neuroscientists have long believed that there are sensitive periods in development during which the effects of experience play a critical role. And developmental psychologists have argued for the importance of early experience in the first years of life as being critical for brain and behavioral development. Most of the neuroscience research…

This article provides an intervention to be used with young children in the foster care or adoption system. "Do You Ever Feel That Way? A Story and Activities About Families and Feelings" is a bibliotherapy-based intervention to be used with young children who have experienced removal from their homes due to abuse or neglect. The narrative tells…

The aim of this research is to examine the effect of The Play supported Program designed for 60-72 month-old disadvantaged children on their readiness levels. The sample of the research has consisted of an experimental group and a control group, each having twenty 60-72 months old children (10 girls and 10 boys) at Göztepe Semiha Sakir Children's…

Foster parents are often faced with serious externalizing behaviors of their foster child. These behavioral problems may induce family stress and are related to less effective parenting and often increase. Foster children with behavioral problems are also more at risk of placement breakdown. An intervention to support foster parents of young…

This study examined classifications of attachment in 42-month-old Romanian children (N = 169). Institutionalized since birth, children were assessed comprehensively, randomly assigned to care as usual (CAU) or to foster care, and compared to family-reared children. Attachment classifications for children in foster care were markedly different from…

Objectives: To describe health-related problems across placement types (unrelated foster, kin foster, in-home with birth parent); to examine the association of placement and demographic/child welfare variables (child gender, age, race/ethnicity; caregiver language; type of maltreatment, and length of time receiving services from child welfare)…

Using an attachment theory framework, this article explores several critical issues in foster care as reflected in the case of Barbara and her 9-month-old son, Nathan. Barbara and Nathan participated in The Children's Ark, an innovative intervention for families in foster care that allowed mothers who had lost custody of their children to live,…

Standardized clinical assessments from the point of view of children are rare. A standardized narrative assessment measure, developed to assess children's perceptions of their caregiving environments, the Narrative Story-Stem Technique (NSST), was used with two fraternal twins, age 8, with histories of severe maltreatment and multiple foster…