The well-being of children and youth is a central Urban Institute research topic. Our work spans child development at the youngest ages to the needs of teenagers aging out of foster care. We study child care, child welfare, juvenile justice, and children's health and education. Read more.
Thursday's Child Thursday's Child series spotlights the daunting pathways through childhood, along with the public programs and policies meant to ease the journey. Co-hosted by the Urban Institute and the University of Chicago's Chapin Hall Center for Children.
Publications on Children and Youth
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The Obama administration has emphasized postsecondary education as the key to its jobs policy, continuing a long-held federal strategy while broadening its goals beyond traditional four-year schools. But disadvantaged students and working adults may still fall through the cracks—and educating college-age youth alone can't meet the nation's employment and social policy objectives. While the focus on college has gone up, federal spending on adult employment and training programs and high school career and technical education has declined. As the nation recovers from the recession, we need to pay more attention to these alternative paths and do more to link education and jobs.
Expert Harry Holzer testifies that 2009 and 2010 have been among the worst years ever recorded for teen unemployment, averaging 25 percent. Prospects for young African Americans are especially grim, with unemployment around 40 percent. But we can help youth into the labor market—during the "Great Recession" and beyond—through an aggressive policy agenda. Existing programs that could be more fully funded are YouthBuild, the Youth Service and Conservation Corps, Year Up, the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe, Gateways, and Youth Opportunities. While these would cost federal funds, the costs of not investing in our vulnerable youth will be far greater.
State agencies finance and administer a range of services - from foster care for abused and neglected children to prisons to long-term care of the elderly. How can large public agencies and small community organizations plan better to meet the needs of the people they serve? Traditionally, useful and timely data for planning purposes have been in short supply. Recent research linking data across a number of public agencies has highlighted some significant findings about state services and the people who use them.
Nearly one in five U.S. youths will run away from home before age 18. Almost 30 percent of these youth will do so three or more times, greatly increasing their risk of violence, crime, drugs, prostitution, STDs, and many other problems. Employing new methodology to yield estimates not available elsewhere, this paper follows a nationally representative sample of 12-year olds through their 18th birthday to discover how many youth run away from home, the number of times they ran away, and the age they first run away. Female and black youth are found to run away the most often.
Low high school graduation rates and sharply declining employment rates continue to plague disadvantaged youth, especially young men. We review the evidence base on programs and policies such as youth development for adolescents and young teens; programs seeking to improve educational attainment and employment for in-school youth; and programs that try to "reconnect" those who are out of school and frequently out of work, including public employment programs. We identify a number of programmatic strategies that are promising or even proven, based on rigorous evaluations, for disadvantaged youth with different circumstances.
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