Earlier this year, an expert panel called for the closure of L.A. County's Welcome Centers for kids awaiting foster placements. But the real problems have more to do with a lack of foster homes and chronic underinvestment in programs that can keep kids from needing foster care in the first place.
Balitmore Sun reporter Andrea McDaniels set out to tell the stories of the children and families who aren’t the direct victims of violence but who suffer its horrible after-effects for years afterwards. Almost nothing about the project was easy, as McDaniels and editor Diana Sugg recently shared.
When it came to reaching low-income mothers suffering from maternal depression and other issues, the old ways of reaching out to moms weren't working. So the New Haven-based MOMS Partnership started taking the services to where moms are — including the local supermarket.
For three months this year, I spent time with some of the sickest, most expensive patients in America — the so-called "super-utilizers." During that time, I’ve learned about the great promise of programs to help such patients, and why innovations that both improve health and save money are so rare.
Infants use about 240 diapers per month. A year’s supply of diapers costs $936. That means a single mother mother working full time at the minimum wage can expect to spend 6 percent of her annual pay on Pampers alone.
What happens to at-risk children whose parents die prematurely, leaving them orphaned? It's a vital question, since health disparities can cause early deaths in some populations, leaving children in precarious emotional, educational and financial straits.
A casual observer watching the preschool-aged children bounce around the outdoor playground at the Children’s Institute wouldn’t immediately notice anything amiss. Except that these kids wouldn’t be here had something not already gone very wrong in their young lives.
While Americans tend to think of sex trafficking as a problem that happens overseas, the United States is a major sex trafficking hub for obvious reasons—it's a rich country. An estimated 100,000 children in the U.S. are forced into the sex trade every year.
Five of the worst schools in Florida are clustered in a 15-square-mile area in Pinellas County’s black neighborhoods. Behavior problems are rampant. Teacher turnover is constant. Michael LaForgia of the Tampa Bay Times investigates how and why these schools are failing kids.
The Denver Post's Jennifer Brown knew there were compelling stories to be told behind Colorado's soaring numbers of homeless children. But finding and following the right families would take her on a six-month journey deep into two families' difficult daily lives.
