Center on Children & Families

Mission

The mission of the Center on Children and Families is to promote the highest quality of advocacy, teaching and scholarship in the areas of child & family law and policy. We believe that children, as the least powerful of our citizens, are most in need of high quality advocacy. They must depend on adults – parents, teachers, doctors and lawyers – to vindicate their rights to protection from abuse and to overcome barriers to education and health care. Children cannot lobby for legislation or retain high-powered lawyers and costly experts. While great strides have been made in educating family lawyers, we believe that too few professionals have the breadth of training necessary to advocate effectively for children and their families.
Our Center is committed to filling the need for high quality advocacy, teaching and scholarship by creating programs and resources that bring an interdisciplinary, evidence-based and child-centered approach to issues of children’s law and policy. Through its Gator TeamChild Juvenile Law Clinic, Conferences, Publications, and Student Fellowships, the Center on Children and Families is training a new generation of advocates for a new era.

Goals

• Promote quality scholarship on issues of importance to children and their families.
• Train a new generation of advocates for children and their families.
• Educate children about their rights and responsibilities in a free society, and
• Promote interdisciplinary and child-centered methods for studying systems serving children and their families.

Emeritus Directors

Shani King

Nancy Dowd

Barbara Bennett Woodhouse

Affiliate Professors

Stephanie Bornstein

Regina Bussing

Kevin Butler

Paige Carlos

Teresa Drake

Jeneé Duncan

Joy Gabrielli

Martie Gillen

Andrew Hammond

E. Lea Johnston

Erica McCray

Kenneth Nunn

Laura Rosenbury

Cameron Rosenthal

Mary K. Wimsett

Danaya Wright

Cristina Zeretzke-Bien

Advisory Board

Selected Scholarship from 2018 to the Present

We present below a sampling of scholarship of our affiliate faculty members in the area of children and families. To see more of their work, please click on their names to be brought to their webpages.

• Early Childhood Matters,  71 (1) Florida Law Review Forum 1 (2019) (with Nancy Dowd) (introduction to symposium volume on early childhood).

• Exposure to Television Alcohol Brand Appearances as Predictor of Youth Brand Affiliation and Drinking Behaviors, Journal of Youth and Adolescence (2021) (with Corcoran, E., Genis, S., McClure, A. & Tanski, S. E.).
• Acute-on-Chronic Stress in the Time Of COVID-19: Assessment Considerations for Vulnerable Youth Populations, 88 Pediatric Research 829 (2020) (with Lund, E. M.).
• Leveraging Social Media to Rapidly Recruit a Sample of Young Adults Aging Out of Foster Care: Methods and Recommendations, 113 Children and Youth Services Review 104960 (2020) (with Borodovsky, J., Corcoran, E. & Sink, L.).
• The A, B, C’s of Youth Technology Access: Promoting Effective Media Parenting, 59 Clinical Pediatrics 496 (2020) (with Tanski, S. E.).
• Innovative Methodological and Statistical Approaches to the Study of Child Maltreatment: Introduction. 87 Child Abuse & Neglect 1 (2019) (with Jackson, Y.).
• A New Recall of Alcohol Marketing Scale for Youth: Measurement Properties and Associations With Youth Drinking Status, 80 Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 563(2019) (with Brennan, Z. L. B., Stoolmiller, M., Jackson, K. M., Tanski, S. E. & McClure, A.).
• E.C.H. Parenting to Promote Effective Media Management, 142 Pediatrics e20173718 (2018) (with Marsch, L. & Tanski, S. E.).
• Maltreatment, Coping, and Substance Use in Youth in Foster Care: Examination of Moderation Models, 23 Child Maltreatment 175 (2018) (with Jackson, Y., Huffhines, L. & Stone, K.).

• Territorial Exceptionalism and the American Welfare State, 119 Michigan Law Review (forthcoming 2021).
• Litigating Welfare Rights: Medicaid, SNAP, and the Legacy of the New Property, 115 Northwestern University Law Review 361 (2020).
• The Immigration-Welfare Nexus in a New Era?, 22 Lewis & Clark Law Review 501 (2018) (invited symposium contribution).
• Americans Need a Stronger Safety Net, Not Just Stimulus Checks, The Regulatory Review (Jan. 11, 2021) (with Ariel Jurow Kleiman & Gabriel Scheffler).
• How the COVID-19 Pandemic Has and Should Reshape the American Safety Net, Minnesota Law Review Headnotes (2020) (with Ariel Jurow Kleiman & Gabriel Scheffler).
• Poverty Lawyering in the States, in Holes In The Safety Net: Federalism & Poverty (Rosser, ed.) (Cambridge 2019).

• Reconceptualizing Criminal Justice Reform for Offenders with Serious Mental Illness, 71 Florida Law Review 515 (2019).

• Introduction to Black Lives Matter Symposium, Florida Journal of Law & Public Policy (forthcoming 2021).
• Toward a New Law of Early Childhood?, 71 Florida Law Review Forum 37 (2019).
• The New Law of the Child, 127 Yale Law Journal 1448 (2018) (with Anne Dailey).

• Opting out of Vaccines for Your Child, 174 (9) JAMA Pediatrics 916 (2020) (with Lindsay A. Thompson).
• Child Abuse Awareness Month During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic, 174 (8) JAMA Pediatrics 812 (2020) (with Lindsay A. Thompson).
• Chronic Critical Illness: Application of What We Know, 33 (10) Nutrition in Clinical Practice 39 (2018) (with MD Rosenthal, AY Kamel, S Brakenridge, CA Croft & FA Moore).

• “Growing Up Shared: How Parents Can Share Smarter on Social Media and What You Can Do to Keep Your Family Safe in a No-Privacy World” (Sourcebook, 2020).
• Changing Faces: Morphed Child Pornography and the First Amendment, 68 Emory Law Journal 909 (2019).
• Documented: My Week at the South Texas Family Residential Center, 30 University of Florida Journal of Law and Public Policy 99 (2020).
• The London School of Economics Parenting for the Digital Future – (May, 2020) Separating parents and social media: helping families navigate online spaces even when parents live apart
• The Washington Post – (May, 2020) An oversharing grandma’s court case offers lessons on setting boundaries for kids’ online privacy
• The New York Times – (May, 2020) How to Keep Children’s Stress From Turning Into Trauma
• The Washington Post – (April, 2020) This may be the time to harness the power of social media as a family
• The Washington Post – (February, 2020) Let’s tell kids what they can do online, instead of what they can’t do
• The Washington Post – (September, 2019) The online privacy checklist your kids need you to have

• What Happened to Grandma’s House: The Real Property Implications of Dying Intestate, 53 C. Davis Law Review 2603 (2020).
• Disrupting the Wealth Gap Cycles: An Empirical Study of Testacy and Wealth, 2019 Wisconsin Law Review 101 (2019).
• Tearing Down the Wall: How Transfer-on-Death Real Estate Deeds Challenge the Inter Vivos/Testamentary Divide, 79 Maryland Law Review (2019) (with Stephanie Emrick).
• The Demographics of Intergenerational Transmission of Wealth: An Empirical Study of Testacy and Intestacy on Family Property, 88 UMKC Law Review 665 (2019).

• Editor, “Quick Hits for Pediatric Emergency Medicine” (Springer Nature 2018) (with co-editors Tricia B. Swan & Brandon R. Eds.).