The title of this blog says it all: 2023 was a big year for Child Trends. We welcomed a new president, kickstarted the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s National Early Care and Education Workforce Center, and had our work featured in a variety of news outlets. We continued examining child poverty and researching how to best support the well-being of Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous children, families, and communities, but our work didn’t stop there. Here are the most-read products on our website from this year. Check out the ones that are new to you!

Child Trends’ essential child welfare resources continued to inform policymakers, practitioners, and the public.

• Our state data tool for understanding child welfare in the United States is a vital resource for state and national policymakers looking to understand and improve child welfare systems. Sarah Catherine Williams, Rachel Rosenberg, and Valerie Martinez updated this hugely popular tool with critical data on child maltreatment, foster care, kinship care, and adoption.
• Additionally, Kristina Rosinsky, Megan Fischer, and Maggie Haas updated our child welfare financing resource, providing a comprehensive look at which funding streams child welfare agencies use, how they use them, and what challenges and opportunities they encounter.

We kept our focus on equity, highlighting how it intersects with health and well-being.

• Brandon Stratford and his co-authors—Bonnie Solomon, Joy Thompson, Devan O’Toole, Kaylor Garcia, Kajol Surani, Michael Martinez, and Sarah Her—developed a toolkit, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that school systems can use to ensure that all employees experience wellness at work. The first section of the toolkit introduces a framework for equitably advancing school employee wellness, while the second section outlines a process by which school systems can apply concepts from the first section and provides links to practical tools that can help teams at all stages of planning and implementation.
• Abigail Wulah, Fadumo M. Abdi, and Mavis Sanders explored the impact of ongoing reproductive oppression and coercion in the United States, which has led to disproportionately adverse sexual and reproductive health outcomes for Black girls and women. Their brief recommends ways to achieve more equitable reproductive health outcomes for Black girls and women, thereby improving their own well-being and that of their families.

We kept our youngest kids in mind, too.

• Doré R. LaForett, Tamara Halle, and Rebecca Vivrette highlighted the ways in which developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) can support children’s learning and development through early care and education (ECE) activities and approaches that are tailored to young children’s specific developmental stages, abilities, and needs.
• The Early Childhood Data Collaborative (ECDC) conducted a nationwide survey of administrators of state-funded pre-K programs to develop a new interactive tool and set of state profiles that provide an overview of 43 states’ capacities to access data on children, programs, and workforce members, and on their ability to coordinate and link data about preschool programs. The accompanying report offers an in-depth look at the types of data that states can access, the prevalence of disaggregated data among states, and state-level data infrastructure and management needs, along with opportunities for growth in these areas.

What’s next for Child Trends?

We plan a strong start to 2024 with new work on child poverty, Black children and families, kinship caregiving, and more. Thank you for your continued support of our mission to improve the lives of children and youth.