We Know Better Than We Do: A Policy Framework for Child Welfare Reform

The need for comprehensive reform of child welfare policies and systems has long been evident. This Article reports observations from the WK Kellogg Foundation-sponsored Families for Kids Initiative that seeks to expand services and support to families and reduce the time children spend in temporary care. The authors first provide an overview of the need for reforms such as those proposed by this initiative, suggesting that many child welfare studies, critiques, and proposed reforms have had similar objectives. The authors highlight lessons learned from how these reform goals are being developed, implemented, and practiced in ongoing programs across the nation and argue that change at multiple levels must occur for reform of this system to succeed. They identify nine methods being used to varying degrees by some of these initiatives to institutionalize reform goals and improve the quality and outcomes of child welfare legal and social service practice. By highlighting these evolving models of state law, agency administrative procedure and professional practice, the authors identify areas of reform for other jurisdictions. Child welfare reform rests upon new legislation mandates; more specific reasonable efforts requirements, adoption of flexible funding mechanisms, capitated foster care contracts, timely court processes better trained professional or cross-system data capability to monitor children in care. All of these policy and system reforms must be designed and implemented collectively for child welfare ideals to become operational

Predictors of nurturant parenting in teen mothers living in three generational families

Direct and indirect effects of grandparents on maternal nurturance in teen mothers (TM) living in three-generational families were explored with path analytic techniques in a sample of 107 working-class families. Perceived support from the teen's mother, grandparents' nurturance toward the baby, and the presence of the grandfather as a father figure in the home were hypothesized as increasing TM nurturance. TM nurturance was found to be positively predicted by grandparent nurturance and negatively predicted by TM perceived support from her mother. The strongest predictor of TM nurturance was grandfather nurturance toward the baby.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43953/1/10578_2006_Article_BF02353198.pd

We Know Better Than We Do: A Policy Framework for Child Welfare Reform

The need for comprehensive reform of child welfare policies and systems has long been evident. This Article reports observations from the WK Kellogg Foundation-sponsored Families for Kids Initiative that seeks to expand services and support to families and reduce the time children spend in temporary care. The authors first provide an overview of the need for reforms such as those proposed by this initiative, suggesting that many child welfare studies, critiques, and proposed reforms have had similar objectives. The authors highlight lessons learned from how these reform goals are being developed, implemented, and practiced in ongoing programs across the nation and argue that change at multiple levels must occur for reform of this system to succeed. They identify nine methods being used to varying degrees by some of these initiatives to institutionalize reform goals and improve the quality and outcomes of child welfare legal and social service practice. By highlighting these evolving models of state law, agency administrative procedure and professional practice, the authors identify areas of reform for other jurisdictions. Child welfare reform rests upon new legislation mandates; more specific reasonable efforts requirements, adoption of flexible funding mechanisms, capitated foster care contracts, timely court processes better trained professional or cross-system data capability to monitor children in care. All of these policy and system reforms must be designed and implemented collectively for child welfare ideals to become operational

Body machine interface: remapping motor skills after spinal cord injury.

The goal of a body-machine interface (BMI) is to map the residual motor skills of the users into efficient patterns of control. The interface is subject to two processes of learning: while users practice controlling the assistive device, the interface modifies itself based on the user's residual abilities and preferences. In this study, we combined virtual reality and movement capture technologies to investigate the reorganization of movements that occurs when individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) are allowed to use a broad spectrum of body motions to perform different tasks. Subjects, over multiple sessions, used their upper body movements to engage in exercises that required different operational functions such as controlling a keyboard for playing a videogame, driving a simulated wheelchair in a virtual reality (VR) environment, and piloting a cursor on a screen for reaching targets. In particular, we investigated the possibility of reducing the dimensionality of the control signals by finding repeatable and stable correlations of movement signals, established both by the presence of biomechanical constraints and by learned patterns of coordination. The outcomes of these investigations will provide guidance for further studies of efficient remapping of motor coordination for the control of assistive devices and are a basis for a new training paradigm in which the burden of learning is significantly removed from the impaired subjects and shifted to the devices