Families With Children

WASHINGTON -- After 2 1/2 years of work, the National Commission on Children next month will recommend major changes in the nation's health and welfare systems, a hefty tax credit for families with children and some form of parental leave legislation, a member of the panel has revealed.The commission will also recommend the creation of a White House coordinator of family issues, according to Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, a Harvard University pediatrician and author who has served on the 34-member commission.

On a recent Saturday night, five McDaniel College students spent the evening off the Westminster campus, busily preparing a meal for about 20 people. The menu of cheesy chicken, broccoli and rice, with brownies for dessert, kept the crew busy in the kitchen on the second floor of the Believe in Tomorrow Children's House, located in Baltimore. As members of McDaniel's Heroes Helping Hopkins, Alex Rieser, Amanda Sickel, Aliyah Clark, Lauren Marsteller and Myeisha Johnson were making dinner for families who are staying at the house - about two blocks from Johns Hopkins Hospital's main entrance - while their children are being treated at the hospital's pediatric department.

NEW YORK -- A wide-ranging, three-year study of young American children to be released today confirms some of society's worst fears: millions of infants and toddlers are so deprived of medical care, loving supervision and intellectual stimulation that their growth into healthy and responsible adults is threatened.The plight of the nation's youngest and most vulnerable children, the report says, is a result of many parents' being overwhelmed by poverty, teen-age pregnancy, divorce or work.

Howard County's cold-weather shelters housed 20 children over the course of the winter — double the number of children who received the housing service in any of its eight years of existence. The program is run at 16 churches from late November to late March, and provides shelter, food, rides and laundry services for up to two dozen homeless people each night. The Grassroots Crisis Intervention center, which administers the eight-year-old service, released last season's data this week.

A generation of American youth is disappearing in the shuffle of two-income families, unresponsive child welfare systems and economically depressed neighborhoods, a study released yesterday reported.The National Research Council commissioned a panel of professors and child welfare experts to research the effects of social climates on adolescents.The council, a division of the National Academy of Sciences, published the panel's findings in a book, "Losing Generations: Adolescent in High-Risk Settings."

Despite gloom-and-doom predictions, don't write off the American family. The Number News, a Dow Jones & Co. newsletter, reports that most Americans still live in families -- they're just not as likely to be the traditional ones, married couples with children. Balancing a decline in the number of such couples is a rising number of single parents that led to a 6 percent increase in the total number of families with children living with them during the 1980s, the newsletter says.After divorceThinking of getting divorced?

ATTENDANTS AT Maryland's first "hunger summit" today hope to begin mapping a route to bridge two islands that are moving in opposite directions: hungry people and government aid.Gov. Parris N. Glendening, social service workers and others are to gather at the University of Maryland Baltimore County with the aim of lifting hunger higher on the public agenda and also to discuss the impact of malnutrition on health care and education.Many operators of Maryland's 600 soup kitchens and food pantries -- consider there were only 50 such facilities in the state a decade ago -- say even they have been startled by the spike in demand.

Too many Maryland children in foster care are in group homes, which are generally more expensive than family care and not as responsive to the needs of abused and neglected youngsters. That recent assessment by the nonprofit group Advocates for Children and Youth is on the mark, and Brenda Donald, who heads the state's Department of Human Resources, agrees. Her agency hopes to recruit 1,000 new foster families by 2010. But ACY counts only 89 new families since June 2007. The agency needs to step up its recruiting and do more to help existing foster families.

A task force looking into the intractable issue of how to make the city's problem-plagued, high-rise public housing developments more livable has come up with a solution that has great promise: Move families with children to non-high-rise public housing units around the city.In effect the group has gone on record as saying that public high-rises are no place to raise children. Turning them into apartments for the elderly is a one alternative that has worked well in places where it has been tried, including Baltimore.

HUNTINGTON, N.Y. - It's a gray and sticky June morning, and Louis Daniels is sitting on the bed of the motel unit he shares with seven brothers and sisters. His "room" is actually a closet-sized space above the boiler room of the Onesti Motel. His desk, where he has done his homework for the past year, is a mattress and box spring wedged into a corner. Beyond the plastic bags full of clothing and the folded-up cots, however, is the 17-year-old's future: a brightly colored college catalog resting on a dresser.

Not everyone needs life insurance, despite what some salespeople may tell you. But too many people who do need those policies, namely parents of minor children, often go without. The number of consumers going without any life insurance at all is on the rise. Thirty percent of U.S. households don't have coverage, compared with 22 percent six years ago, according to recent survey by LIMRA, an industry-supported research group. Among those going without: 11 million families with children under age 18. The number of American households with an individual policy purchased outside any workplace coverage — about four out of 10 — is at the lowest level in 50 years.

The Canton neighborhood has discovered how good it is to give back. In the past four years, as an old convent found new life as a home to dozens of bone-marrow transplant patients and their families, Southeast Baltimore residents and business people have brought meals and love to families caught up in complicated medical treatments that stretch over many months. The Believe in Tomorrow House at St. Casimir — just off Canton's O'Donnell Square — has become the focus of neighborhood goodwill.

Health advocates and landlords squared off Thursday in Annapolis over a proposal to beef up Maryland's lead-paint law, which both sides agree has succeeded in drastically reducing the number of young children poisoned in older rental homes. Advocates, pediatricians and health officials urged the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee to approve a bill that would require landlords to test for lead dust in rental units built before 1950 if they are to be occupied by families with children.

Too many Maryland children in foster care are in group homes, which are generally more expensive than family care and not as responsive to the needs of abused and neglected youngsters. That recent assessment by the nonprofit group Advocates for Children and Youth is on the mark, and Brenda Donald, who heads the state's Department of Human Resources, agrees. Her agency hopes to recruit 1,000 new foster families by 2010. But ACY counts only 89 new families since June 2007. The agency needs to step up its recruiting and do more to help existing foster families.

Three-year-old Landon Morrill is perhaps too young to understand the power of positive thinking. But to see the joy in his smile and the bounce in his step, you would never think that he recently underwent a wrenching bone-marrow transplant - after his parents were told he had a 1-in-10 chance of surviving treatment for his leukemia. "Can you do Happy Feet?" his mother, Colleen, asked, referring to the animated film with dancing penguins. Landon then frolicked as he tapped his tiny feet on the floor, occasionally hamming it up for all who watched with delight.

Every presidential candidate wants to be a good friend to the middle class. As for the rich - well, they'll always be taken care of, one way or another. But as the campaign for the White House moves into high gear, is anyone looking out for the interests of the poor? More than 10 percent of American families - about 37 million people - live at or below the poverty line. For decades, more than 40 percent of the poor have been children. Throughout the years, the percentage of poor families with children has varied widely.

If you're tempted to think of the late 1940s and 1950s as a Golden Age of family life, here are some statistics worth pondering: In 1948, as the baby boom was starting up, the tax exemption for one dependent amounted to 42 percent of the nation's per capita personal income. A family of four -- a father, mother and two children -- would have little or no tax liability.By 1984, the exemption for one dependent was worth only 7.6 percent of the nation's per capita personal income. The situation was marginally better by 1990, when a major tax reform law and a significant increase in the personal exemption had increased the value of the dependent exemption to 11.1 percent.

A separate Family Court, authorized in the General Assembly this year, should make a big difference for families who find themselves caught up in the judicial system. From custody cases to families with children in trouble with the law, the current justice system is characterized by long delays and the distinct signal that other cases take priority over family matters. That move is one of several actions taken by the legislature this year that will have a tangible effect on the lives of children in Maryland.

If it's New Year's Eve, it must be First Night Annapolis in the state capital. Designed to draw families with children to join in arts-based revelry, the 16th annual First Night Annapolis will be a citywide celebration showcasing more than 200 performers and culminating in fireworks and live music at City Dock at midnight. Last year, temperatures reached the 60s on New Year's Eve. This year, organizers are ready for any kind of weather. "The show is going to go on, whether it's 62 degrees or it's snowing," said Lisa Miles, a publicist for First Night Annapolis Inc., the nonprofit group that runs the event.

HUNTINGTON, N.Y. - It's a gray and sticky June morning, and Louis Daniels is sitting on the bed of the motel unit he shares with seven brothers and sisters. His "room" is actually a closet-sized space above the boiler room of the Onesti Motel. His desk, where he has done his homework for the past year, is a mattress and box spring wedged into a corner. Beyond the plastic bags full of clothing and the folded-up cots, however, is the 17-year-old's future: a brightly colored college catalog resting on a dresser.