Neighborhoods, families, and children: Implications for policy and practice

Abstract

Recent global and national trends have put a growing number of families and children living in the United States at risk for adverse health and developmental outcomes. Policies and programs designed to address these problems have too often focused on the characteristics of individuals as the root cause and have failed to address significantly core problems. The research reported here suggests that researchers, program planners, and policy makers should go beyond the focus on individuals to incorporate and target larger structural issues such as increasing poverty, growing economic inequalities between rich and poor, and eroding public social programs. This research demonstrates the importance of larger social structures for individuals' health. It also has implications for policy, namely: Neighborhoods are an important target for intervention; policy makers must take a multi-issue approach to addressing problems of the inner city; programs should look at building on community resources and infrastructure, as well as address the needs of individual community residents; and a "one-size-fits-all" mentality is not appropriate when designing programs to serve neighborhoods. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.