Iowa held its place at fifth in an annual Kids Count report which ranks each of the states on how well they do in taking care of kids.

Iowa Kids Count Director, Michael Crawford, says the state has ranked anywhere from third to fifth in the last five years — and this year holds that trend. “We’ve had some good things and some bad things,” Crawford says, “really overall it’s a good report for Iowa.” The report uses 16 measures to rank the states against each other.

Crawford says there are a lot of differences between states and it is tough to get a true picture of how they match up against each other. He says it is important to look at the data from Iowa and compare it to the past and he says there are positives when you look at the numbers. “The teen birth rate has decreased 41 percent since 2010– so that is a good sign. In addition we’ve had decreases in the number of children without health insurance coverage. We are down to three percent of all of our children are uninsured right now. And then also, high school students not graduating on time is down to nine percent,” according to Crawford.

Iowa ranks fourth in the report nationwide in the economic well-being category. But Crawford says there are areas there where there could be improvement. “The bad news is, just a couple of areas, is our child poverty rate has somewhat stagnated the last few years,” Crawford says. “It has decreased a little from 2010, but since 2014 it has stayed relatively stable or stagnated about 15 percent.” He says the poverty numbers are higher for children of color in the state. Another area where he seeds a need for improvement is the number of kids living with just one parent.

“Right now that’s about 30 percent of all of our kids in Iowa live in single parent families,” he explains. “We are lower than the national average in that indicator — but still it’s higher than we’d like to be.” Crawford says He says there are a couple of things that could be done to improve the economic well-being of kids. One is an increase in the minimum wage.

“We feel it should be increased to about 10 dollars per hour. I think it would help families cover the cost of raising and supporting their kids….so that’s one area where we could help families financially,” Crawford says. “Another area I think is on the income tax return, on the Iowa income tax return. I think increasing the child tax credit from 40 dollars to 100 dollars per child I think would help families quite a bit also.” Crawford works at the Child and Family Policy Center and says the state does a good job when you look at the history and progress Iowa is making.

“It is a good place to live and a good place to raise kids and I think overall we do well,” Crawford says. “And as I mentioned, rankings compared to other states, it’s good to look at that it makes us feel good — but we think it is also very important to look at Iowa compared to Iowa. Where we are now compared to where we were five to ten years ago.”

You can see the full results of the Kids Count survey at www.cfpciowa.org.

Rachel, Brian and Alex Black.

Child adoption events were held in several Iowa cities this past weekend, with two of the largest events in Black Hawk and Hamilton counties.

As part of the Adoption Saturday event in Webster City, a family from Rockwell City family adopted a boy just in time for Thanksgiving.

Rachel Black said she and her husband, Brian, were thrilled to add to their family via adoption. “He’s our third in three years. His name is Alex and we’re super, super excited,” Black says. “It’s been 311 days. Yes, we’ve counted, and we’re so excited to welcome him to our home.” Black says they’re no strangers to adoption.

“His biological brother we adopted last year in Fort Dodge and then we adopted another one in Fort Dodge the year before that, too,” she says, laughing. In all on Saturday, 16 children were adopted by ten families in Webster City while 23 children were adopted in Waterloo. Learn more about the adoption process in Iowa at this website — www.iowafosterandadoption.org.

(Story and photo by Pat Powers, KQWC, Webster City)

There’s an urgent call for Iowa families to open their homes to take in foster children and to adopt. Bambi Schrader, recruitment supervisor for Iowa KidsNet, says there’s a critical need for families to shelter sibling groups, teenagers and children who are older than eight-years-old.

“We have about 4,000 children in the foster care system,” Schrader says. “In 2015, there were 2,560 children referred into foster care. Unfortunately, we only have about 2,100 foster homes across our state right now so we’re in desperate need.” There’s a continual waiting list for children in Iowa seeking “forever homes.”

“A lot of times children are waiting longer in shelters or residential treatments or unsafe situations or there are being multiple children placed into a home where they might’ve only taken one or two children, now they have three or four,” Schrader says. “We want to make sure each child has their own unique home that meets their needs.” For many children in foster care, it could take three years to be adopted. She says there’s a need for every type of family as kids come in all types.

“We need everything from two-parent households to single-parent households, same-sex couples,” Schrader says. “We need some older couples that maybe aren’t looking to adopt but would take an infant that we want to reunify.”

Private adoptions may take several years and tens of thousands of dollars, but she says state adoptions through Iowa KidsNet are essentially free. The adoption process may take six months and it includes a home study, 30-hours of classwork and a background check.

“Having lots of money or having a nice, fancy home is not what the kids need,” Schrader says. “They need people who care about them. They need people who love them. They need people to be there after school and people who will say, ‘No, you’re wearing that to school. Go change your clothes,’ or put discipline into their lives. A lot of our kids don’t have that or when they do have it, it was done in a harmful way.”

More than 23,000 children age out of the foster care system nationwide every year. Last year in Iowa, 39 children aged out with no family or permanent home. Learn more at http://www.IowaKidsNet.comor by calling 800-243-0756.

Megan Gilligan (ISU photo)

A relationship study of older mothers found more issues than expected with their children. Iowa State University researcher Megan Gilligan is the lead author the study which she says found 1 in 10 mothers had at least one estranged child. They didn’t start the study with a focus on finding mom and kids who weren’t talking.

“So there were no questions directly asked, you know ‘is there a child who you are estranged from?’ But, we did ask all of the mothers about their relationships with each of their children,” Gilligan explains. “So the study was designed to look at how these relationships might vary. Some mothers may be closer to one child, or the opposite where they may be more disappointed in another child.”

The study included mothers aged 65 to 75 with children who were 45 or older. “The first thing we looked was if a mother had not contact — either in person or on the phone — in the last year. And then also, we classified estrangement if the mother maybe had very small amount of contact, so maybe she had talked to them once in the last year,” Gilligan says.

They also asked the mothers about their emotional closeness and she says they were surprised at the number who say they have little emotional closeness to a child.

“Which is actually pretty rare in parent-adult child relationships. Most of the time mothers report either middle-range or actually high range emotional closeness. So, there were relationships that the mother reported very little emotional closeness to these children,” Gilligan says.

Gilligan is an assistant professor of human development and family studies at ISU and conducted the research with colleagues at Purdue and Cornell University. She says they were surprised again when they started looking at the cause of the bad feelings between mother child. “Immediately everyone kind of thought on the research team, well lets look at illegal behavior — so we looked at if the child had had problems with the law or if they had a substance abuse problem, ” Gilligan says. “But was really interesting is that didn’t predict estrangement. Those children weren’t more likely to become estranged.”

They found something else impacted the rift. She says “value dissimilarities” ended up being the strongest variable. The core values and beliefs of the mothers drove their views of their kids. “One of the mothers was really upset that her adult child had gotten a divorce and then remarried. She was Catholic and she said ‘that really goes against what I believe religiously and morally.’ So thing that were kind of core to their beliefs and values, if the child had violated those things, that’s what created this tension and strain in the relationship,” Gilligan explains.

Gilligan says they didn’t expect those issues to cause so the estrangement. “I think it’s interesting, because I think these are issues we often think about as political issues that you might get into a discussion around the table and get really upset about those types of things. But, I don’t know if most people would feel like these are things you would cut off contact from your child,” Gilligan.

In addition to core values, researchers found the mother’s marital status was also a predictor. Mothers who were divorced or widowed were more likely to have an estranged child than mothers who were married. Gilligan credits the role of the father. She says many of the incidents the created estrangement happened earlier in the child’s life and they might not have realized the impact it would have. Gilligan says the lesson could be that you need to focus on mending a relationship right away when these things happen. The new study is published online in the Journal of Marriage and Family.