Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation

Abstract This article demonstrates that children’s language and literacy development shares an inextricable relationship with their social and cultural worlds. Cultural factors always shape the ways different communities engage in reading and writing. Young English language learners bring culturally shaped beliefs and experiences regarding reading and writing to school, where they are taught important beginning literacy skills and practices that may not fit with their previous experiences. This article calls for carefully designed research that explores promising curricular modifications that may increase the early literacy abilities of children from cultural and linguistic backgrounds different from mainstream educational environments.

Abstract The 5 articles that constitute this special section follow a roundtable meeting that took place on April 16–17, 2008 in Washington, DC, on the topic of supporting positive language and literacy outcomes for young dual language learners (DLLs; 0–5 years of age). The 2-day meeting in Washington was the outcome of planning efforts by prominent researchers and representatives from several federal agencies interested in articulating the many complex and challenging research issues on language and literacy development that are particular to young culturally and linguistically diverse children.

The purpose of this article is to share our story of conceptualizing Indigenous early relational wellbeing (ERW), specifically reflecting American Indian and Alaska Native worldviews. Our approach is grounded in Indigenous methodologies and guided by a Community of Learning comprised of Indigenous and allied Tribal early childhood community partners, researchers, practitioners, and federal funders. We describe the steps we took to conceptualize caregiver-child relationships from an Indigenous perspective, center Indigenous values of child development, apply an established Indigenous connectedness framework to early childhood, and co-create a conceptual model of Indigenous ERW to guide future practice and research. This model highlights relational practices as seeds of connectedness and relational wellbeing, and includes the roles of spirituality, culture, and ceremony in nurturing ERW; the manifestations of relational wellbeing across the lifespan; and the interdependence of relational wellbeing within communities and families, across generations, and with the environment. The model also informs the creation of a measure to understand practices that foster relational wellbeing among Indigenous children and families and their relationship to positive development, thus informing research, practice, and policy.

Mounting research has revealed how the labor of caregiving and parenting in the United States fell disproportionately to mothers during the COVID-19 pandemic, with negative impacts on mothers’ personal and professional well-being. Here, we advance this growing body of work by examining how mothers’ pandemic-related parenting and caregiving experiences differed across socioeconomic status. We ask the degree to which mothers’ class-based parenting approaches persisted or dissipated in the wake of the pandemic. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted with 130 mothers caring for children under eighteen in 2020–2021, we find that these parenting patterns largely continued into the pandemic, with mothers’ socioeconomic and employment status shaping how they experienced and navigated this disruption and particularly how they managed competing paid and unpaid labor demands.

Parents with serious mental health (MH) and substance use disorders (SUD) can face profound challenges caring for their children. MH/SUD treatment can improve outcomes for both parents and their children. This study evaluated whether parents with Medicaid with MH/SUD conditions whose children had child protective services (CPS) involvement were receiving MH/SUD treatment and whether receipt differed by race. We analyzed the 2020 Child and Caregiver Outcomes Using Linked Data (CCOULD) which contains Medicaid and child welfare records from Kentucky and Florida on 58,551 CPS-involved caregivers. Among caregivers with an MH diagnosis, White individuals were more likely than Black individuals to have received counseling (42% vs. 20%) or an MH medication (69% vs. 52%). Among caregivers with an SUD, White individuals were more likely than Black individuals to have received counseling (43% vs. 20%) or an SUD medication (43% vs. 11%). More effort is needed to connect parents with CPS involvement to MH/SUD treatment, particularly Black parents.

A majority of young children in the United States experience some form of regular nonparental child care. Nonparental child care can support children's development and also allow parents to seek employment outside the home. There are many different types of nonparental care, including center‐based child care, family child care settings, and family, friend, and neighbor care. This entry describes these different types of settings as well as demographic patterns of nonparental child care use within the context of nonparental child care markets, policies, and dimensions of quality of nonparental child care.