Exploring Instability and Children's Well-Being: Insights from a Dialogue among Practitioners, Policymakers and Researchers

Exploring Instability and Children’s Well-Being Insights from a Dialogue among Practitioners, Policymakers and Researchers GINA ADAMS AND LISA DUBAY JULY 2014 The authors would like to thank the Foundation for Child Development for their generous support of this project; Mark Bogosian and Donald Hernandez for their substantive contributions; Caroline Heller, Julia Isaacs, Heather Sandstrom, and Margaret Simms, who were instrumental in the design and implementation of the convening and provided insights and guidance for this report; Michael Marazzi and Fiona Blackshaw for their editorial support; and the convening participants who shared their time, wisdom, and enthusiasm. Copyright © July 2014. Urban Institute. Permission is granted for reproduction of this file, with attribution to the Urban Institute. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders. Contents Introduction 1 What Is Instability? What Are the Characteristics of Instability That Seem Likely to Affect Children’s Well-Being? 2 Where Does Instability Occur in Children’s Lives? 3 What Might Be Some of the Pathways by Which Instability Affects Children’s Wellbeing? 4 What Child, Parent, Family, and Contextual Factors Seem Likely to Play a Role in Affecting the Impact of Instability —Either by Buffering or Exacerbating the Impact? 5 What Research Is Needed Regarding Instability, and Its Effects on Children Development, to Inform Policy and Practice Solutions? 6 What Are the Implications for Policy and Practice? 8 Conclusion 9 Appendix A. Participant List 11 Appendix B. Meeting Agenda 13 Notes 15 References 16 About the Authors 16 Introduction Awareness is growing of the essential role of stability in children’s healthy development and ability to learn—and of the damage that instability can do. This concern, however, has emerged separately across many different domains, including different policy areas (such as housing, education, child care, and health care), different areas of research (such as family economic security, child development, and school mobility), and different perspectives (such as federal, state, and local policymakers; researchers; and practitioners working directly with families in communities across the country). There has been little focus on the pervasive and interconnected nature of the issue or on possible cross-cutting policy strategies and solutions that could be employed to support stability and better outcomes. These converging realities provide a unique opportunity to take a comprehensive look at the issues of stability and instability in children’s lives and to begin to weave together these disparate threads and concerns to identify strategies to better support children’s ability to learn and succeed. Researchers with the Urban Institute’s Kids in Context Initiative are working to this end through a multiphased project. This report presents insights gleaned from one phase of this effort, specifically a convening of a distinguished group of 35 policymakers, practitioners, researchers, thought leaders, and funders who were brought together with the support of the Foundation for Child Development1 to begin a dialogue about stability and its role in children’s development. This convening was held on November 14, 2013, and was designed to explore the implications of stability and instability for children’s development as well as to discuss what we know, what we need to learn, and what we need to do across research, policy, and practice. (See appendix A for a list of meeting participants and appendix B for the meeting agenda.) Additional results of this dialogue, also supported by the Foundation for Child Development, include a compendium of short essays by some of the speakers at the convening that catalogues the most important ideas they took away both from the convening and from this synthesis (Adams 2014), and related blogs by Urban Institute researchers. The convening built upon an earlier phase of this work, which involved conducting a cross-disciplinary review of the research on instability and its implications for children’s development across a range of domains, which was supported by the Low Income Working Families project, with funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. This earlier step resulted in the publication of The Negative Effects of Instability on Child Development: A Research Synthesis and a related fact sheet (Sandstrom and Huerta 2013a, 2013b). This review of the research offers a definition of instability and explores its effects in five domains: family income, parental employment, family structure, housing, and the out-of-home contexts of school and child care. It also discusses recommendations for policy and practice to alleviate instability's impact. This document synthesizes the insights and perspectives of the participants on the following questions: 1. What is instability?