Children and Families

California Democrats understand that children and young people are integral to our society. For them to thrive, we will work to provide them with a healthy start, a solid education, and a safe community. We support the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, recognizing as a human right that children should be afforded special care and protection.

To ensure that all children and young adults have the tools to reach their full potential, California Democrats will:

1. Work to support child and community well-being through programs and agencies that promote mental and physical health, provide social services for the myriad of issues young people face, prevent child abuse, and fund programs that keep families together through services. These programs and agencies must cover all children, regardless of financial or social status; 
2. Support healthcare and developmental wellness through access to timely quality health care services across all ages from pre-natal to young adults, addressing medical, mental, and behavioral services;
3. Support the providers who ensure the care of California’s children, through their access to education, work, and labor representation, as children must have access to high-quality, affordable childcare, across all models;
4. Support access to quality education, healthy school meal programs, and non-toxic school buildings and materials to ensure children have a safe and healthy learning environment;
5. Work to protect the health rights of children and parents through, but not limited to, addressing perinatal care to reduce Black infant and maternal mortality and access to testing for genetic diseases in infants – especially for communities historically underserved and not served;
6. Work to end and properly address the impacts to children and young adults of sexual harassment, gender based violence, bullying, and discrimination, based on gender, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation; and,
7. Support the Governor’s California Men’s Service Challenge and other efforts to address mental health concerns for young men.

Support the Child Welfare System and the Courts to ensure that all children are served and protected.

1. Work to ensure that Child Protective Services and social workers utilize trauma-informed practices and have the resources needed to protect children in familial (domestic) and non-familial (institutional) environments and support foster youth;
2. Work to ensure that Child Protective Services reunify families when possible; improve the foster care system to ensure that child abuse and neglect court proceedings that protect the welfare of children are accessible, swift, and unbiased; aggressively enforce child-support payment rulings; ensure child support payments are timely paid and urge enforcement in a manner that maintains a payer’s ability to pay; and encourage foster youth to successfully complete high school;
3. Support the adult guardians and children who interact with Child Protective Services, ensuring a fair and equitable legal process for all;
4. Support nonprofit child welfare and family service agencies with the financial resources necessary to meet the increasing demand for high-acuity youth stabilization in kinship/relative care homes, resource family homes (formerly known as foster family homes) and residential care facilities known in California as Short Term Residential Therapeutic Programs (STRTPs);
5. Work to combat the disproportionate rate at which families of color are unnecessarily reported to and involved with the Child Welfare System by working to address racial disproportionality through improved training and decision support tools to help mandated reporters and hotline operators distinguish between a parent’s economic disadvantage and true neglect; and,
6. Promote community-based family support services to keep families who could be better-served elsewhere out of the Child Welfare System, thereby freeing-up resources for those children who need to be protected and separated from dangerous situations.