Family Homelessness

The ACF Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) published this brief on the relationships between homelessness, enrollment in early care and education, and young children’s developmental outcomes after they leave emergency shelters. OPRE compared a sample of 925 children, ages 18 months to 59 months, 20 months after staying in emergency shelters with their same-age peers from all socioeconomic levels. The authors used nationally normative childhood developmental measures on developmental delays, school readiness, and behavioral challenges. In addition, the brief uses survey responses by parents to measure continued housing instability following a stay in emergency shelter and child care arrangements used by families during the 20-month period following the shelter stay.

This report from the Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness (ICPH) is part of its Student Homelessness in New York City series. In this report, ICPH looks at disruptions that often coincide with the experience of housing stability, such as mid-year transfers and chronic absenteeism, can threaten the educational stability. Consequently, these school instability factors may negatively affect academic performance and ruin a student’s ability to graduate. This report focuses on mid-year transfers and chronic absenteeism and how to support students experiencing homelessness so they can fully experience the same educational opportunities as their housed peers. (author abstract modified)

The US Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau developed this Resource Guide to support service providers in their work with parents, caregivers, and their children to prevent child abuse and neglect and promote child and family well-being. The Resource Guide primarily targets community-based child abuse prevention professionals who work to prevent child maltreatment and promote well-being. However, other professionals, including policymakers, parent educators, family support workers, healthcare providers, program administrators, teachers, child care providers, mentors, and clergy, may also find it useful. It includes information about trauma, human trafficking, family homelessness, and youth-related issues. The guide is also available in Spanish. 

This guide provides information on how school counseling personnel can support students who are experiencing homelessness. It includes a list of questions to assess their immediate needs related to safety, food, health, family dynamics, transportation, employment, and school. In addition, the guide provides school counselors with action steps they can take based on the outcome of the initial assessment. A checklist for graduation planning is also included. The author discusses issues such as trauma and other barriers that school counselors should consider when working with this student population.

This brief from the ACF Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE), looks at whether family characteristics can identify repeated or persistent experiences of homelessness before and after a shelter stay. OPRE analyzed data of 2,282 families from the larger Family Options Study to determine if practitioners in the field can identify families who will experience repeated or persistent homelessness and thus will need additional support.

This is the sixth in a series of Research-to-Impact briefs by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago to understand and address youth homelessness. This brief presents data from the in-depth interview component of the Voices of Youth Count report. The researchers conducted 215 interviews with youth, ages 13 to 25, from five diverse counties across the United States: Cook County, Illinois; Philadelphia County, PA; San Diego County, CA; Travis County, TX; and Walla Walla County, WA. The findings show young people who deal with housing instability experience significant adversity, family disruption, and interpersonal trauma both before and after their homelessness. This brief recommends revisions within the Runaway and Homeless Youth Program Authorizing Legislation (RHYA) based on these findings.

This report from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) looks at the long-term effectiveness of various programs to address homelessness for families with children. The Family Options Study randomly assigned 2,282 families to four housing or services interventions between September 2010 and January 2012 across 12 sites nationwide. The interventions were 1) permanent housing subsidies, 2) community-based rapid rehousing, 3) project-based transitional housing, and 4) usual care (emergency shelter and housing or services that families can access without immediate referral to a program that would provide them with a place to live). Each family participating in the study had spent at least seven days in emergency shelter and had at least one child age 15 or younger at the point of enrollment. The study found that families offered a subsidy experienced less than half as many episodes of subsequent homelessness as well as improvements in measures related to residential stability, food security, and other non-housing domains compared with families offered the other three interventions. 

This toolkit provides information about how the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act protects the rights of children and youth to stay in their schools while their families are experiencing homelessness or housing instability. It provides resources to help parents understand their children’s educational rights and whom they can contact at the school system level and how to seek legal representation.

This journal article presents a study comparing the risk of suicidality and factors that may protect against it between youth who are homeless with adult family members and non-homeless youth. The researchers used cross-sectional data, representing 62,034 eighth- to 12th-graders, to estimate the emotional distress, self-injury, suicidal ideation, and attempted suicide in the past 12 months for youth who experienced family homelessness compared with housed youth. Overall, 4% of youth in the sample were homeless with an adult family member. Among these youth, 29.1% reported self-injury, 21% reported suicidal ideation, and 9.3% reported suicide attempts. The study found that developmental assets decreased the odds of these outcomes for all youth but were less protective for homeless youth. These findings indicate youth experiencing recent family homelessness are at higher risk of suicidality than their non-homeless peers, suggesting homelessness is itself a marker of risk. The researchers discuss the need for interventions among homeless youth to address social determinants of health such as stable housing and adversity in addition to developmental assets. (author abstract modified)

This brief from the ACF Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) uses data from the Family Options Study to explore how often children in homeless families were separated from their parents before, during, and after staying in emergency shelters. This analysis includes both voluntary and involuntary child separations among the 5,397 children in 2,282 families who either stayed with their families in emergency shelter or were separated from their families upon entry. The brief also describes the subsequent separation and reunification experiences of children in the 1,857 families who responded to the 20-month survey and the 1,784 families who responded to the 37-month survey. The findings show children separated from their families were older on average and most stayed with the other parent or relatives during separation.