Preface

Welcome to the third issue of JFSW for 2021. Core to our mission at JFSW is to publish research and practice articles addressing topics related to caring for and parenting children. To that end, this issue offers four articles addressing parenting, in particular, parents who are struggling due to substance abuse, child welfare system involvement, coparenting, financial struggles, or psychosocial struggles. The first article “Assessing Values within Collaborative Interventions for Families with Parental Substance Use and Child Welfare Involvement” authored by Huebner, Yan, and Sanders who report on their revisions and resulting psychometrics of a survey instrument, the Collaborative Values Inventory (CVI). The CVI assesses the beliefs across agencies of professionals about working with families struggling with parental substance abuse and with child welfare involvement from a family centered and collaborative approach. In the second article, “Low-income Mothers’ Participation in the Understanding Dads Intervention and Changes in Self-reported Coparenting” authored by Fagan, Henson, and Pearson details an evaluation of a mothers-only coparenting program while the fathers participated in a fatherhood program and examined whether those interventions created change in the mother's coparenting attitudes and relationship with the father. Findings revealed mothers reported less conflict, less undermining of the fathers, and greater confidence in coparenting. The third article in this issue, “The Centrality of Resourcefulness in Explaining Wellbeing among Financially Challenged Single Mothers” authored by Kulik who reports on quantitative research exploring the daily hardships and social and personal support and resources of low income single mothers in Israel. Findings revealed that higher levels of resourcefulness were associated with increased reports of social support and wellbeing, while also related to lower daily experiences of hardships. Further, that for these single mothers, more children and increased subjective experience of poverty were related to lower levels of resourcefulness. The fourth and final article in this the third issue of 2021 is entitled “Association between Caregiver Depression and Child After-school Program Participation” authored by Daly, Parsons, Blondino, Clifford, and PromWormley who describe their work examining the effects of parental/caregiver depression, parental/caregiver stress, and child participation in after-school programming. Their analysis found that child participation in after-school programming predicted a low likelihood of a parental/caregiver depression JOURNAL OF FAMILY SOCIAL WORK 2021, VOL. 24, NO. 3, 175–176 https://doi.org/10.1080/10522158.2021.1939373