Poverty, like neglect, is a constellation of complex challenges. We are too often investigating families for child maltreatment because other systems are failing. When this happens, a family that may have been experiencing temporary financial insecurity becomes more vulnerable to compounding factors such as homelessness and mounting stress. It’s in these moments that a family becomes vulnerable to a child welfare investigation and potential family separation. So how might we begin to address financial insecurity before it becomes poverty? How might we support families experiencing poverty before it leads to child neglect?
Today’s episode included the following speakers (in the order they appear):
Opening quote: Jennifer Jones – Chief Strategy Officer, Prevent Child Abuse America
Host: Luke Waldo
Experts:
0:03 – Jennifer Jones – Opening statement on systemic challenges and poverty.
00:59 – Luke Waldo – Introduction to another root cause of neglect - poverty.
4:47 – Kristi Slack – Child welfare statistics and disparities. Impact of poverty and housing instability on families and child welfare involvement. Economic safety net’s impact on child maltreatment prevention.
9:07 – Gabe McGaughey and Kristi Slack – Poverty is a constellation of issues. Poverty compounding other risk factors.
13:07 – Luke Waldo – Family vulnerability as a consequence of systems’ failures.
14:15 – Bryan Samuels – Economic loss, unemployment, and housing instability as the most likely predictors of child welfare involvement. Financial benefits, childcare, housing stability, and employment as a social safety net.
16:12 – Jennifer Jones – Child well-being system to support overloaded families. Economic and concrete supports reduce risk of child welfare involvement.
21:01 – Kristi Slack – Complex, multi-faceted nature of neglect. Class-action lawsuit that led to the Norman Fund for overloaded families living in poverty.
23:32 – Kristi Slack – Challenges that arise when families are experiencing housing instability.
25:26 – Luke Waldo – Complicated relationship between poverty and child neglect. Introduction to social capital.
26:53 – Bregetta Wilson – Self-efficacy. The stress and impacts of poverty.
30:33 – Gabe McGaughey and Tim Grove – The impact of trauma and social capital on economic mobility.
34:02 – Bregetta Wilson – The impact of planting seeds on self-efficacy.
35:37 – Luke Waldo – 3 Key Takeaways
38:07 – Closing credits and Gratitude
Join the conversation and connect with us!
Jennifer Jones 00:03
It shouldn't be about me being resilient. It should be about how do we create the conditions so that all kids and families and communities thrive and we don't have kids coming to the attention of the child welfare system for child neglect; we don't have kids living in in poverty and dealing with the inequities that we talked about.
Luke Waldo 00:35
Welcome to Overloaded: Understanding Neglect where we explore the complexity of child neglect, its root causes and challenges that families experience that overload them with stress, and the opportunities that we have to improve our communities, organizations and systems that build strong families and thriving children.
Hey, everyone, this is Luke Waldo, your host for this podcast and the Director of Program Design and Community Engagement for the Institute for Child and Family Well-being, our partnership between Children's Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee's Helen Bader School of Social Welfare.
In last week's episode, we explored trauma and systemic oppression in the forms of racial and class disparities as root causes of child neglect. Today, we will be looking at another root cause: poverty. As I was conducting these interviews, and asking questions specifically about the impacts of poverty and child neglect, I often referred back to an article that was written shortly before the pandemic by Dr. Jerry Milner, and David Kelly, who were both serving as leaders in the US Children's Bureau of the Department of Health and Human Services. In that article, they wrote, "We have to be honest that a large part of the problem is the way we see and judge families that make contact with the system. We see poor and vulnerable families as the other. The role that poverty plays in child welfare decision making is a topic that has yet to be meaningfully confronted and addressed. Poverty is a risk factor for neglect, but poverty does not equate to neglect. The presence of poverty alone does not mean a child is unsafe, unloved, or that a parent lacks the capacity to care for his or her child. Poverty can make it more challenging for parents to meet certain of their children's needs. We must also be very clear that poverty is disproportionately present in communities of color, and that this fact carries direct implications for child welfare. They go on to write. Rather than seeing these root causes, with clear eyes, calling them out and taking them on with intention. We remain stuck as a system and society that focuses on the harmful after-effects, often casting blame on vulnerable families for their very vulnerability. Rather than trying to prevent poverty, and the many challenges associated with poverty, such as social isolation and lack of meaningful opportunities and support, we search for increasingly sophisticated evidence-based interventions to treat the trauma or fix the symptoms arising from a family's inability to meet their children's fundamental needs. We believe this must change."
This podcast series shares that final sentiment. We, too, believe this must change and believe that the first step in that change is understanding this reality that too many families are being separated by our child welfare system, for reasons of neglect, that could be prevented if we addressed root causes such as poverty. As we will be talking almost exclusively today about poverty, it's important that we revisit Wisconsin's definition of neglect. It states neglect as the failure, refusal, or inability on the part of a caregiver for reasons other than poverty, to provide necessary care, food, clothing, medical or dental care or shelter so as to seriously endanger the physical health of the child. As it is often very difficult to separate poverty from the inability to provide those many basic needs for a child, we will be exploring it more deeply with our experts with the hope that we will build a clearer, shared understanding of the reality that so many overloaded families experience.
To begin our conversation today, Dr. Kristi Slack, professor at the University of Wisconsin's School of Social Work, and affiliate at the Institute for Research on Poverty, will share the relationship between poverty and child neglect. As always, please leave your feedback questions and ratings in the comments and rating section of the podcast. Now, on to the episode.
Dr. Kristi Slack 04:47
You know, I'm sure you've seen these studies that have been around since about 2015, '16, '17 where the cumulative childhood incidents of child welfare system involvement is estimated. I don't think most people know this, but 37% of U.S. children experience a child maltreatment investigation in their childhoods. You know, over 50% of Black children do. You know, one in ten Black children are placed into foster care during their childhoods. 13% of U.S. children have a confirmed incident of maltreatment during their childhood. I mean, these are, these are astounding statistics. And you would think this would result in, you know, attention to this public health crisis. All hands on deck, right? But it just flies under the radar. And it's become almost really a normative experience in this country to have contact with child welfare systems. And that's, that's just an enormous problem that people should be not only concerned about, but really upset about.
Part of our challenge in this country is that we haven't typically looked at the economic safety net to include housing assistance as a child maltreatment prevention tool. You know, there's been a flurry of research over the last five to ten years that suggests the economic safety net very much has an important role to play in preventing child maltreatment, and child welfare system involvement, but those systems don't really think of themselves as a tool in the toolbox for that outcome. And we also, I think, struggle in this country with sort of what we believe the causes of poverty are. So if you believe poverty is caused by individuals, you know, by individual failures or something on the part of the individual, you're going to see policies that promote personal responsibility, and you're going to see policies that seek to sort out the deserving from the undeserving, right. Those are very much hallmarks of our safety net, in the US.
And I think what has to happen is we have to start looking at those safety net programs collectively as our society's responsibility in an effort to stabilize families and prevent really, really bad outcomes, like child maltreatment and deep end system involvement, not just child welfare system involvement. And that society has, you know, some accountability to do that. But it also requires convincing people that poverty has structural causes, too, that are rooted in, you know, hundreds of years of how this country has evolved over time. And that is hard to convince some people of, as far as the families that get involved in the system for reasons of neglect, who are then also at risk of having family separation occur, the words that come to mind are family instability. Certainly, poverty, and often chronic poverty is present. And the chronicity of neglect is also a phenomenon that most child welfare workers and policymakers and others who study child maltreatment are familiar with. It's families that kind of keep coming back to the system, which to me really just suggests that other systems are failing. Those are some of the things I think about.
And then, you know, poverty being one of the most pronounced risk factors for neglect. And for system involvement is also a risk factor that sort of interacts with and compounds a lot of other risk factors. And so that's an additional challenge. When you see families that maybe have multiple risks, poverty is usually present, or at least a partial root cause of a lot of the things families are dealing with, who get involved for reasons of neglect.
Gabe McGaughey 09:07
Neglect and poverty, both are these kind of blanket terms that actually mean a lot of different things. They represent kind of a constellation of issues, not one single item, it's a constellation. Can you talk a little bit about what are some of the biggest misconceptions about neglect and the intersection with poverty that you see in your work?
Dr. Kristi Slack 09:30
Yeah, a couple of things. I mean, one thing I'm always really careful to say whenever I present on this topic about the relationship between poverty and child maltreatment, is that the vast majority of families who struggle with poverty do not maltreat their kids. But when you look at it from the side of the child welfare system, the vast majority of families who who become involved with child welfare and who may have one or more children placed in foster care, have been or are currently experiencing poverty. So that correlation we've known about for decades and decades, and there's been lots of descriptive studies that have been done to document that relationship. So it's, but it's important to say poverty is not a deterministic risk for child maltreatment or child welfare system involvement.
The other misconception or just I think tension in the field right now, with trying to get our arms around this association between poverty and child maltreatment, is that poverty in and of itself, is rarely a reason that families get involved with child welfare. You know, some of the research that's out there on sort of the kinds of allegations that come in to child welfare systems have shown that it's, it's really quite rare for a family to to only be reported to child welfare for reasons of poverty alone. You know, this, this mantra from way back in the early 1900s, that you don't want to ever separate families for reasons of poverty alone, that was part of our discourse around child welfare, you know, over 100 years ago now, but poverty is still present, you know, in a lot of these situations. And so while the system may do a pretty good job at deflecting families who show up or are reported for reasons of poverty, you know, things like homelessness, or insufficient food, or, you know, clothing or whatever basic needs, and only those things, there's a general belief within the child welfare system, and I think external to it too that that's not the appropriate situation to be referred to a pretty deep end and intensive family serving system.
So I think it's good that we know that that the system works to deflect those families. But again, it suggests that there are families that come to the attention of child welfare, who shouldn't be there, but maybe aren't getting well served in other systems. And it doesn't solve the problem of poverty, compounding other risk factors that maybe do need to be brought to the attention of child welfare systems. In the larger debate around this question, on poverty and its relationship to child maltreatment, there seems to almost be an over-simplistic view of what is meant by that association. Because poverty, we don't want to conflate it with neglect. You know, there's been research showing that children who experienced both poverty and some documented form of neglect fare worse than children who quote unquote only experienced poverty, but that doesn't mean that poverty hasn't contributed in some way to the former group's trajectory.
Luke Waldo 13:07
As Dr. Slack stated in this previous segment, coming in contact with the child welfare system has become a normative experience in this country. We should be astounded by what she describes as a public health crisis, in which too many of our children and families are being investigated by our child welfare system. We are too often investigating these families for child maltreatment because other systems are failing. When this happens, a family that may have been experiencing temporary financial insecurity becomes more vulnerable to compounding factors such as homelessness and mounting stress. It's in these moments that a family becomes vulnerable to a child welfare investigation and potential family separation. So how might we begin to address financial insecurity before it becomes poverty? How might we support families experiencing poverty before it leads to child neglect?
In this next segment, Bryan Samuels, Jennifer Jones and Dr. Slack will begin to share some policy solutions that may provide some answers to those questions.
Bryan Samuels 14:15
What we know from the literature is that family economic insecurities increases the likelihood of child welfare involvement. So when you think about kind of the the most reliable predictors of child welfare involvement, they are typically economic loss, income, unemployment, having lost a job, housing, hardship, having lost stable housing, or having a set of accumulated experiences that create economic vulnerabilities. Those are the things that are the most likely predictors of child welfare involvement.
So when you think about the things that really help people create the social safety net that prevents them from moving towards child welfare, you really want to think about the federal programs that can be brought together, nestled together in ways that will support families. So TANF is an important asset of one that makes a difference when families are particularly vulnerable. And so having access to it readily available in times of need is critical.
The second is really around childcare, having access to affordable childcare in the context of families trying to work and raise their families. A third component of an economic and concrete services strategy would be stable housing, looking at the housing stock in communities, as well as housing policies that give some folks access to housing, while creating barriers for other families to have access to housing.
And then the last component is really around supporting work, right, making sure that the local economy takes into account the needs of families, and families have access to the kinds of employment that provides consistent support. You take those four pieces together, and you begin to build a social safety net that prevents families moving towards child welfare.
Jennifer Jones 16:13
We are in the process right now at Prevent Child Abuse America of doing an adaptive strategy process. And one of the questions that we are exploring, and that we are seeking feedback from from our partners and our staff and our families with lived expertise is this idea that imagine in the future, where we are living in a society where everyone is experiencing wellbeing, and there are no inequities as we see them today, whether it's it's inequities due to race, or LGBTQ status, or disability. And it's hard for us to vision that it's hard for anybody to sort of get to that space, because we've spent so much time in this experience of adversity, and, you know, individuals having to build up their own sort of up by the bootstraps, right? Or whatever that that ridiculous quote is, it shouldn't be about me being resilient. It should be about how do we create the conditions so that all kids and families and communities thrive and we don't have kids coming to the attention of the child welfare system for child neglect. We don't have kids living in in poverty, and dealing with the inequities that we talked about.
So just a couple of things that I would like to share around this idea about supporting overloaded families. So we know that families facing an overload of stress related to poverty and racism can actually hamper their ability to provide the supportive relationships and conditions that kids need to prosper. We know that increases in economic and concrete supports to families actually reduce cases of neglect. There is research that shows that we also know economic supports, like the Child Tax Credit, like cash assistance, like Paid Family Leave, all of the things that I've mentioned, and other policies that raise family incomes can actually lessen this weight of the stressors of poverty that overload families. I also want to mention here we do as well know, on the other hand, that states that that have limited implemented time limits of less than five years that families can actually receive assistance through TANF, which is the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families federal program, those states actually saw a 33% increase in neglect. And there are plenty of of advocates like ourselves and researchers that argue that the reason child neglect has not decreased in our country is actually due to failures at the policy level and the system's level to recognize and implement these economic and concrete supports as a strategy to prevent child maltreatment.
So again, this idea that families are overloaded, a lot of it is related to this idea that there's financial hardship, and then you throw everything else on top of that, and families have a really hard time, they are very challenged, and struggle. I want to actually throw another quote out there from our article, it was actually written by Dr. Megan Feely and she said, "financial hardship remains one of the few preventative factors that is unaddressed in the current policy context. And in fact, intentional public policy decisions would create a different context for communities, families and individuals." So this quote is one of my favorite quotes in in the article based on the research showing the complex relationships between race and poverty and neglect. By putting an actual bigger emphasis on addressing poverty, we should, without a doubt, see a decrease in child neglect cases in the US.
I want to say a couple more things in this idea of overloaded families and systems, and that is again we know that children and families of color are more likely to be impacted by poverty and to come to the attention of the child welfare system for neglect and other forms of child maltreatment. Also, we know that families of color reside oftentimes in communities with very high concentrations of poverty. And they have very limited access to services and supports. And we know that 14% of U.S. children are black, they make up 27% of children living below the poverty line.
And so again, these systemic issues of poverty, of racism have structural determinants of health that largely impact people of color, and overload families that are already challenged with, again, these individual ACEs and other struggles make it much harder for them to parent, make it much harder for them to provide adequate care and necessary attention to their kids.
Dr. Kristi Slack 21:01
Neglect is, so it's such a multifaceted type of maltreatment, right? Where with sexual abuse and physical abuse, it's usually you're looking at sort of degrees of severity. With neglect, it's you know, you could have educational neglect, you could have sort of basic needs neglect, supervisory neglect, medical neglect, emotional neglect. It's a more multifaceted form of maltreatment. And so some of it may just depend on why you're there.
The only sort of like tidbit of information I can offer around that question is that back in the mid 90s, so long ago, there was a class action lawsuit in Illinois, and it was related to a family that had been homeless. And they were reported to the child welfare system because of their homelessness, and the kids were removed and placed into foster care. And that resulted in a lawsuit, a class action lawsuit, and eventually was the impetus for creating something called the Norman Fund in Illinois, which was really just about providing cash assistance to families that were showing up for reasons of poverty alone. And that program, there was a quasi-experimental evaluation done on the program. And it appeared to both prevent involvement in child welfare and the removal of kids into foster care. But it also facilitated a quicker return home.
So while that program was about this very unique group of families that I said, don't show up that often or or when they do, they're deflected, you know, for reasons of only poverty. If that's sort of undergirded the whole system, you know, if that economic assistance was there, for all families, you know, where especially where kids are separated from caregivers, if that was just sort of a given part of the service intervention, and families were prioritized for that economic support, and they didn't have benefits taken away at a really critical time, I would imagine you'd see quicker reunification, and probably the prevention of separation to begin with, for a fair number of families, certainly not all of them, but for many. And I think that should really be a goal of our child welfare system is to make sure we're not serving in child welfare families that are better served by an economic safety net. And that means that the change needs to also happen outside of the child welfare system.
If you don't have a secure housing situation, you're almost at a daily risk of everything unraveling. If there are issues that require, you know, other kinds of psychosocial interventions like parenting classes or therapy, it's very difficult to engage in those kinds of, of services and support. If you're at risk of losing your housing or you don't have housing, stable housing at the moment, I have not worked as a child welfare frontline worker, I've shadowed many of them over the years but never worked as one myself, I've sure talked to a lot of them, and housing is the thing that always comes up as the biggest challenge in terms of what families need and what we aren't able to provide.
And, and so there's been some research on sort of these Housing First initiatives that seek to stabilize families, housing situations, as sort of a precursor to other kinds of service delivery. And there's mixed results. It's not always in the hypothesized direction, or there's not always statistically significant findings, but there's, I think, enough evidence to show that it likely would make a huge difference if housing was easier to come by, while you're working on dealing with other issues that need to be resolved in the family. Of course, it's linked a lot of times to poverty. So in some ways, there's many of the same underlying root causes involved, but that instability it creates, I think, can can often truly create a downward spiral for for families that make them at greater risk of having kids removed as well as having families reunited.
Luke Waldo 25:26
Through Dr. Slack, Bryan and Jennifer, I hope you have developed a strong understanding of the complicated relationship that poverty and child neglect have. Poverty often leads to additional challenges and stressors such as homelessness, food insecurity, and mental health crises. So it is imperative that we seek to strengthen those systems and policies that can help to prevent it. But systems and policies are only effective if the people that could benefit from them are able to access them.
In the coming segment, Bregetta Wilson and Tim Grove will talk about how individuals and families who have lived with adversity or in poverty for generations may find a path towards prosperity. Bregetta tells a story about the power of planting seeds and self efficacy. Tim follows with Raj Chetty's lessons on how social capital can make all the difference when overcoming adversity. While you are listening to them, I'd ask you to think about how you, as part of the systems or communities mentioned earlier by Dr. Slack, Bryan and Jennifer could be that planter of seeds, that one person that could move a child, caregiver or family away from family separation and towards family well being.
Bregetta Wilson 26:54
I think that sometimes what I've seen in families, that sense of self efficacy to be able to, you know, go out and get a job, and not just get a job but have the desire to, to elevate within that job. I mean, who wants to, no one wants to be poor. No one wants to be in poverty. No one wants to struggle and think like, how am I going to feed my kids tonight? That's a stress that a lot of people have, unfortunately. And so it affects one's mental illness, was like you say, the coping skills of substance abuse and falling into the feeling of feeling numb. We see, you know, a lot of domestic violence, abuse, aggression.
And so that was when I think about the young man who, who wanted to go to school. He wanted to go to school, but he didn't have a stable house. So over time, unfortunately, a lot of families just give in to the, they feel defeated. You know, I think about my mom, you know, when I think about this question a little bit, and I think about her desire to want to care for her children, it was there. You know, she did the best that she could. But she struggled with substance abuse, she struggled with domestic violence. But over time, I began to notice her own sense of self efficacy. Do I feel like I can do this? Do I feel like I have the skills or the connections to make these things happen? And so when you think about the things that our families have inherited, when you think about the trauma, the historical trauma, the mental illness, the substance abuse, some of this is not by default.
Someone once told me, poverty is not meant to be changed, it's meant to be managed. And I thought that that was a very alarming statement. When you think about the work that I currently do in my space as the Lived Experience Coordinator for the state, not just that role, my role as a Mental Health Advocate after hours, you know, and then for me to be in that space and see how the systems are engaging with each other. I sometimes as a mental health professional have to send documents to my colleagues as a mental health professional, but I see that this family is struggling with certain system level things that I can't necessarily address because, you know, there is either ethical issues or there's processes in that and so, I think that people forget that, like, no one, no one really wants to be in a space of harm. But if it's the only place that I have to be in, I'm gonna, you know, struggle with feeding my kids, I'm gonna struggle with substance abuse, I'm gonna struggle with, you know, unhealthy relationships, because that's all I may have seen. And a little bit that I have seen that hasn't been, that's not enough for me to feel like I can get to that space is what I've seen.
Gabe McGaughey 30:33
So Tim, as we're kind of talking about neglect stressors that families face, I don't think we can talk about that without talking about poverty. Can you talk a little bit about the role that you've seen poverty play in your, in the work that you've done with the families that you serve?
Tim Grove 30:47
I come to this like most things from stress and trauma and resilience angle. So I was pretty struck by Raj Chetty's work, which was published three years ago in the Atlantic. And one of the things that stuck out to me was two things, actually his emphasis on structural process, and historical structural process, and how that contributes to the creation of conditions where poverty is more of a likely outcome. And the other thing that struck me as a trauma guy was his talking about social capital.
So I don't remember the direct quote, I'll paraphrase again, and hopefully get it mostly right, but basically thinking about the causes of poverty, or the barriers to sort of overcoming poverty being largely about social capital. And when I think about that from a trauma frame, I think about how trauma impacts our ability to engage in productive relationships. If you think about it, the other really insidious outcome of trauma is the people who predominantly hurt you are other humans. And the brain and body start to develop in many people an instinctive process that says I need to be skeptical. I need to survive you as a human or even if I categorize you as a person of authority, because that's where my trauma occurred, think of what that means for people's ability to maintain a job.
So we've done a lot of work with entities in Milwaukee in sort of other places, and Scaling Wellness in Milwaukee is doing this work, many others are doing this work to say "how can we help employers understand this a little bit, so they can help people be more successful on the job?". Because honestly, if we could find a way to keep our parents, let me go all the way back to the beginning, our three month old kid's mom, or dad or parent, right? Or caregiver, I probably should say, if they can keep and sustain a job at 21 bucks an hour, or 25 bucks an hour, it's amazing how a lot of things, not everything, but a lot of things get better. So I don't know that we can sort of in good conscience talk about even the trauma and neglect intersection without talking about poverty. And I just appreciate the opportunity to sort of loop the trauma piece back into the poverty piece. Because I think Raj Chetty might be right, the ability to navigate relational process is critical to being successful economically.
Bregetta Wilson 34:01
In my role, I always say I'm going to plant little seeds of hope, and inspiration, you know, and I remember I was doing a group with a group of girls, teenage girls in my internship, and, they were, anger was the topic. And the girls, you know, they came to group and they were all mad about certain things, and they were all in foster care or some system. And, you know, I made a comment, and we talked about McDonald's and I told one of the girls I said, you guys should not be eating McDonald's, you know, McDonald's is bad for you. You know, nothing against those McDonald's eaters. I mean, I'm just saying, but six months later, I get a call from the person I was running the group with, and she says, Bregetta, guess who I seen? And it's the she said a young girl's name and she says, you know, she has not ate McDonald's in six months since you told her that. And I was like, Oh, wow.
So sometimes if we plant seeds, and people, her sense of self efficacy and her sense of confidence has been elevated. So it's about really how do we plant those seeds of self efficacy in families? To get them to see that? You know, there there are opportunities.
Luke Waldo 35:37
I hope that today's episode and insights from our experts have you thinking more about how poverty and its many manifestations are too often what is underlying neglect. How might we change or better coordinate our systems, and invest more in promising or proven policies and practices, so that families no longer experience the public health crisis of child welfare investigations experienced by too many children and families in this country? How might we plant more seeds, build stronger communities and be part of the social capital for our most vulnerable children and families? I hope you have come back for our next episodes as we explore those questions more deeply.
But before we go today, as always, I wanted to highlight three key takeaways to reflect on as we move into our next episodes. One, while poverty may not be the sole reason a family is separated by our child welfare system in the state of Wisconsin, it is certainly an underlying root cause for many of the families that are separated for reasons of neglect.
Two, as poverty too often leads to compounding challenges such as homelessness, food insecurity and chronic stress, it is imperative that we reimagine and redesign our child welfare system to include strong anti-poverty practices and policies, or invest in a more comprehensive child maltreatment prevention system that focuses heavily on poverty reduction, and economic mobility.
Three, each one of us, as part of a community, organization or system, have an opportunity to plant the seed to be a supportive partner to empower and facilitate in individuals or families social capital, and path towards prosperity and well-being. As Bregetta shared, if we plant a seed and nurture the soil, if we share an aspiration with authenticity and support, we may soon see it grow and bear fruit.
Thank you for joining us for this third episode. We hope that you will come back and listen to our fourth episode next week as we explore how these underlying root causes create complex challenges for overloaded families, and how family strengths and resilience help them overcome them. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share with friends, family and colleagues. Also, if you rate us on whatever podcast platform you listen to us on, it makes it easier for others to find us. To learn more about the experts that you heard today, visit the show notes, which is where you will also find links to sources or information that were mentioned in today's episode. Thank you again for joining us. See you next week.
Luke Waldo 38:07
This podcast would not have been possible without the support and talents of Carrie Wade, who is responsible for our technical production and original music composition. I can't express my gratitude enough to Carrie for all she gave to this project. I'm also grateful to Gabe McGaughey, our Co-Director here at the Institute for Child and Family Well-being, who contributed to the ideas behind this podcast and interviewed some of our experts. Finally, I would like to thank all of our speakers that you have heard today and throughout the podcast for their partnership, their willingness to share their stories and expertise with me and all of you and their commitment to improving the lives of children and families. I'm Luke Waldo, your Host and Executive Editor. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.