The leading resource for federal policymakers on the prevention and treatment of child abuse and neglect
Policy Agenda
Since 1981, the National Coalition for Child and Family Well-Being (formerly the National Child Abuse Coalition) has been the foremost resource for federal policymakers on the prevention and treatment of child abuse and neglect. This federal policy agenda reflects our longstanding commitment to promoting both child and family well-being and child protection.
Children thrive when their families thrive. The policy recommendations below are aimed at providing children and families the support they need as early as possible, which supports better outcomes and family autonomy by avoiding unnecessary intervention by the formal child welfare system. They are also focused on ensuring child safety by protecting children who experience abuse and helping them heal.
Priority 1:
Strengthen and support families and communities to improve child and family well-being, and prevent the abuse, exploitation, and neglect of children and youth.
Expanding community-based, voluntary supportive services that increase child and family well-being, through programs like the Community-Based Child Abuse Prevention (CBCAP) program, is a powerful strategy for stabilizing and strengthening families. The Coalition also supports investments in other funding sources that support families before a crisis occurs and help them thrive.
Providing economic support both improves child and family well-being and can reduce child abuse and neglect by improving parents’ ability to satisfy children’s basic needs, access quality child care, and reduce parental stress and depression. The Coalition supports investments in tax credits such as EITC and CTC, economic support through programs like TANF, food assistance such as SNAP and WIC, housing, child care, and paid family leave – all of which are proven approaches for improving child and family outcomes.
For children and youth, such comprehensive approaches may include: mobile response and stabilization services; in-home clinical services; parent and youth peer support; early childhood mental health; school-based mental health; and ensuring youth have opportunities to build strong relationships as a necessary component of healing from trauma. Scaling these solutions will require a collaborative approach across federal, state and local government and the private sector, as well as a strong mental and behavioral health workforce.
For families, comprehensive approaches should include mental health, SUD treatment, and research-informed domestic and sexual violence services. Parental substance use, mental health challenges, and domestic violence are three of the leading drivers of child welfare system involvement and put children at greatly increased risk of abuse and neglect. To make progress towards decreasing the incidence of abuse and neglect among children, the federal government must expand access to substance use, mental health, and domestic violence interventions by providing additional resources and partnering with public, private, and faith-based organizations to fill service gaps
Family-centered substance abuse treatment programs access to family-centered treatment approaches that meet the needs of parents in recovery and the needs of their children simultaneously, and allow parents and their children to remain together whenever possible. Current policies designed to support this access also often face financing implementation barriers that federal policy could address.
Over 2.6 million children are being raised by a grandparent, other relative, or other adult with an emotionally significant relationship. Known as kin caregivers, these adults provide essential support to children who cannot be raised by their parents. Often, these caregivers – many of them with fixed or limited income – step in at a moment’s notice to keep families together and many need support to get connected to financial supports, services, and legal representation.
Priority 2:
Improve the response when a child is victimized and/or enters the child welfare system by connecting them to evidence-based treatment.
Recognizing that children heal in the context of their relationships, it is important to support a full continuum of family-based placement options appropriate to the child’s needs, including kinship care, therapeutic placements, and family foster care where children can build relationships. This also involves ensuring that family-based caregivers have the training and support needed to remain stable and help children heal, and that children are able to maintain relationships with their parents when possible.
Children and youth enter foster care with significant trauma and experience further trauma within the system. To ensure they can heal, children who have experienced serious psychological, physical, and sexual abuse must be able to access high-quality, evidence based treatment that addresses underlying trauma. Additionally, young children heal through age appropriate, multi-generational therapies that help them form attachments to their caregivers. While psychotropic medication can be a tool to help promote healing, too many children and youth have reported overuse of psychotropic medications in the absence of alternative evidence-based treatments.
Experiencing abuse, exploitation, and/or foster care can be fundamentally disempowering for children and youth, undermining efforts to promote healing from trauma. Expanding opportunities to engage children and youth in their care and their case planning processes in developmentally appropriate ways and give them agency to determine the healing modalities they will receive will allow them to heal on their own terms and at their own pace.
Many children who experience maltreatment are able to remain with their family with supportive services, and about half of children who do need to enter foster care return home. Approaches to supporting parents, caregivers, and children should be centered around what families need to heal, which in turn will increase reunification rates and help children and families thrive longer-term.
Ensure that young children who touch the child welfare system are swiftly connected with early intervention services – including IDEA Part C, EPSDT, and home visiting – all of which are aimed at meeting their unique developmental, physical and mental health needs.
Youth in care who are pregnant, soon-to-be-parents, or parenting face unique hardships, negative outcomes, and heightened scrutiny, it is crucial that specialized approaches be developed and proliferated to meet their needs. This includes two-generation approaches to addressing financial well-being, parenting skills, and education, along with support to strengthen youth’s networks of support and deepen the parent-child relationship. Investing in these approaches can ensure better outcomes for both the expectant or parenting youth and their children and disrupt generational cycles of child welfare involvement.
Support programs like the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) and Victims of Child Abuse Act (VOCAA).
Youth offenders are often themselves victims, and evidence shows that rehabilitation works better than lifelong punishment.
Priority 3:
Improve the accuracy and effectiveness of investigations to protect children from harm, while also avoiding harm to parents from unnecessary investigations.
More than half of all reports to CPS are unsubstantiated, and the resulting investigations can be harmfully disruptive for families. Pediatricians, teachers, law enforcement officials, and other mandated reporters face legal requirements to report on families. At the same time, we have too many instances of children directly in harm’s way going unreported. Excessive investigation of families that just need supportive services undermines the child welfare system’s ability to discern which cases truly warrant a response, raising the risk of serious outcomes including child fatalities. The federal government can take action to evaluate the impact of mandated reporting and innovative work happening in the field to identify alternative referral pathways that ensure families who do not need a CPS response are connected to services and supports.
The stakes are high for workers who are making decisions about a child’s safety and risk and the needs of their family. It is critically important that workers are well-trained, and that they quickly connect children and families to the appropriate services and interventions needed as well as high quality forensic interviews and other components of an effective and trauma-limiting investigation when harm has occurred.
High-quality legal representation, including pre-petition legal representation, is one of the most effective ways to ensure the rights of parents and children are protected and limit deeper child welfare involvement or a child’s entrance into foster care.
Due to the wide variation in federal statutory and regulatory expectations and how states have designed and utilized their registries, many parents are inappropriately placed on state registries and lose their jobs or find it difficult to become employed in certain fields once on the registry. Many parents will face these employment bans and other negative effects even without removal of their child or criminal legal action. Federal policymakers can take action to ensure registries are appropriately managed and do not negatively impact parents without due process.
Domestic violence and unmet parental mental health and substance use disorder treatment needs are major drivers of involvement in the child protection system. Rather than separate families, effective services can often keep them safely together, improving outcomes and reducing trauma. Continued work to build on the foundation of the Family First Prevention Services Act can help further expand this approach, and should ensure that lack of access to services does not bring more families unnecessarily into the child welfare system.