As the fiscal crisis continues in most states, governors and legislatures are considering budget cuts to early childhood programs. But research from the Pew Center on the States shows that spending less today on evidence-based children's policies means taxpayers will face much higher costs later for problems including child abuse and neglect, high school dropouts, crime, teen pregnancy and drug and alcohol abuse.
The Pew Center on the States is a division of The Pew Charitable Trusts that identifies and advances effective solutions to critical issues facing states. Pew is a nonprofit organization that applies a rigorous, analytical approach to improve public policy, inform the public and stimulate civic life.
Responding to increasing awareness and concerns, the MIT Young Adult Development Project was created in 2005 to analyze, distill, and disseminate key findings about young adult development, findings that shed light on the unique strengths and dramatic challenges for this extraordinary period.
Child Trends is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center that studies children at all stages of develop. Their mission is to improve outcomes for children by providing research, data, and analysis to the people and institutions whose decisions and actions affect children, including program providers, the policy community, researchers and educators, and the media.
The mission of The Future of Children is to translate the best social science research about children and youth into information that is useful to policymakers, practitioners, grant-makers, advocates, the media, and students of public policy.
Why do youth abuse alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs? How can you tell when a young person is using, and how should you respond? What if a student tells you that someone else is using drugs? This hands-on resource provides an overview of the substances kids are most likely to use (including over-the-counter drugs and increasingly popular inhalants), concise descriptions of effects and warning signs, and a guide to working with youth, parents, the school, social workers, and law enforcement. Comprehensive, realistic, and optimistic, it follows the entire cycle of substance abuse, from experimentation to recovery.
