July 10, 2013  Subscribe

Youth Voting Fell in 2012 

  Voting among young adults has fallen since 1971, when 18-to-20-year-olds gained the right to vote. Maybe this is because many youth feel uninformed about politics and the electoral process; a recent study found that one-third of high school students lack a basic understanding of how the U.S. government operates. And, youth don't feel government and elections are relevant to things they care about. Check out the Child Trends DataBank for newly-released indicators on youth voting in the 2012 election.

Trend Lines Blog 

 

Why it's time to learn more about the children of LGBT parents

Since the recent Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage, life will change for the many LGBT families in the U.S. Regardless of how the court had ruled, though, we need more research on the outcomes for the estimated two million children being raised by lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) parents, and the dynamics of their families. In a recent blog post, Child Trends' Rachel Gooze and August Aldebot-Green explain why. See the Supreme Court rulings here. 

 

Full Disclosure?

At Child Trends, our business involves information about children. How do we balance that with children's need for privacy, especially in this digital age? Research Scientist David Murphey describes the safeguards we have in place to protect our research subjects, and the impact a new update to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act will have on the tracking of children's personal information.

Three Tips for Building Successful Mentoring Programs

Child Trends recently looked at evaluations of mentoring programs to determine which practices seem most effective for the approximately three million children and youth in structured mentoring programs.  In a new blog post, Child Trends Liz Lawner and Martha Beltz give three tips for building successful mentoring programs, based on the synthesis they co-authored with Senior Research Scientist Kristin Moore.  Read the synthesis.

What Works for Children and Youth

Interested in programs for children or youth? Discover What Works, a database of more than 600 programs that have undergone random-assignment evaluation to find out what works, and what doesn't, in out-of-school-time programs. You can search by age, race, program type or setting, targeted outcome(s), and more. We've also synthesized what we've learned about similarcategories of programs into fact sheets, located here.

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