Today,  the U.S. Senate passed a two-year   budget bill, already approved by the House, for fiscal years  2020 and 2021.  The   budget deal  raises funding caps, a crucial first step that allows increased spending on discretionary programs like the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), Head Start, and WIC.

In the budget deal passed in 2018, Congress included a  $5.8 billion commitment to increased CCDBG funding. While this year's bill did not include a specific funding commitment for child care, it paves the way to maintain and build on last year's historic increase.

The Senate can now use the appropriations process to further increase CCDBG funding in the 2020-2021 budget. Advocates have requested an additional $5 billion to help meet families' needs. At a minimum, senators should match or exceed the   House's proposal.

 

Increasing funding for CCDBG-the largest source of federal child care funding-would support children and caregivers for years to come. Investing now would build on hard-won progress in recent years. In 2014, CCDBG's bipartisan reauthorization laid out important, ambitious goals: stabilize families' access to care, increase basic health and safety, and help child care providers improve quality. The law initially left many states struggling to meet the promise of its provisions but recent funding increases have allowed states to realize the reauthorization's potential.

Link to full article.

When we talk about health and safety in child care, the discussion is often on reducing or eliminating physical threats to children's well-being (e.g., unsafe playground equipment of the spread of an infectious disease). CCAoA believes that quality child care helps build healthy children, including their healthy social and emotional development.  But what about children who have experienced trauma? How can the child care environment help them heal? This is the third of four blogs CCAoA is publishing on social-emotional health.  

Trauma among young children is  widespread  - so widespread  that most  child care  programs  serve children who   have  already  experienced  a  traumatic event   or will  experience one  during early childhood. 1  Many  children  have  been exposed to  chronic  trauma  due to ongoing   abuse or neglect,  living with  a parent with untreated mental illness and/or a substance use issue, witnessing  incidents of  domestic violence, etc.  

T raumatic childhood events overwhelm a child's ability to cope, triggering a stress response. With chronic trauma, the child's stress response system is activated too often, for too long, resulting in toxic stress . It can cause changes in the parts of the child's brain that control learning and behavior. Toxic stress can also negatively affect a child's physical health and social-emotional development.