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Texas had made progress in recent years in how we protect and care for kids in our state systems. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of work to be done, as some disturbing recent news stories, about children with mental health challenges in state hospitals and the foster care system, suggest.

Texans on SNAP, formerly food stamps, are mostly working families with children. The program allows children to have better, more reliable diets than they would otherwise, and that is something essential to kids' long-term health and success. Unfortunately, families participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program stand to lose an average of $53 per month in their food budget, if a plan pending in Congress right now to "block grant" the program, instead of basing it on need, is enacted. By contrast, a strong SNAP program would help Texas reverse a trend as the state with one of the nation's highest food-insecurity rates for children. Last fall, our Health Policy Coordinator Lauren Dimitry participated in the last days of the Texas Food Bank Network's Food Stamp Challenge, when volunteers were asked to try eating, not on the current individual SNAP allowance of $4.50 per day, but on the budget once the cuts are enacted: just $3.70 per day. This post contains Lauren's account of that experience.

Children's mental health doesn't get the same attention as physical health for children. That is part of the reason for this week's Children's Mental Health Awareness Week. After a string of highly publicized suicides by young bullying victims, this year's event felt especially important--as though this particular awareness has life-and-death importance.

Most of us don't know where our tax dollars go. In polls, taxpayers guess wildly off the mark about how their tax dollars are spent. Although the White House just started offering an itemized receipt for each tax filer's contribution to Uncle Sam, there isn't one big agency to explain all your taxes—federal, state, and local. We set out to remedy that, with a little analysis of where your tax dollars go and roughly what portion gets allocated to children.

For kids and their supporters, 2010 was a mixed year,. Still, there were some big steps forward in the policy arena when it comes to children, over the last 12 months. Those wins are worth remembering--especially as we head into a year that promises a roller-coaster ride on the policy front. What follows are my personal Top 5's for biggest policy wins for children in 2010 and top issues to watch in 2011.

A vote at the ballot box can help make millions of children healthier, better off, safer, and more secure, says the national advocacy organization Voices for America's Children. That's why Voices, our national affiliate, is asking bloggers across the country to share a "Vote Kids First" message today: spreading the word that all the adults headed into voting booths this week can also claim responsibility for those who are too young to cast a ballot. In addition to the Voices challenge, we remind you what your Representative in the U.S. House needs to hear from you right now about child hunger and nutrition, and we provide our weekly round-up of the news.

Do school bullies belong in jail? What does bullying itself do to children's mental health? When kids make other kids' lives miserable, is it time for the state to respond? These are the questions media outlets are raising in the wake of a series of high-profile suicides by children and teenagers in Texas and elsewhere.

Today health insurance for Texas children and their families begins working a little better. More children who are sick will get coverage they need, even if they have a so-called "pre-existing condition," something like asthma or even cancer, which led insurers previously to deny them care. More insurance plans will fully cover preventative care, like vaccines and screenings, for the youngest Texans, mothers-to-be, and others. More families will be able to keep their college-aged and young adult children on the family health care plan. In short, some of the things that were making children in this country less healthy than their counterparts in other well-off nations get addressed today through protections that go into effect under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

"From Our Clarity in Choices Department" will be a new recurring feature on our blog. We'll use it to highlight some of the tradeoffsTexas faces as decision-makers cope with a financial crisis. Our goal is to move from the fuzzy jargon of politics (like "10% budget reduction") to something a little easier to understand (like "vaccines for 112,000 children"). In these posts, we'll also puzzle through the costs for Texas in a way seems warranted (for example: "If it costs more in unnecessary health spending due to sicknesses and hospitalizations, does eliminating vaccines for kids to save money really make sense?")

First up are two issues our policy staff members have recently testified about at the Capitol: early childhood services and childhood obesity prevention.

For many, 2003 is remembered as an especially ugly year. The economy had taken its post-September 11th dive, and top leaders responded with severe cuts to services and programs that many Texans relied on. Hundreds of thousands of Texas children lost their health coverage, tragedies followed deep cuts to the state's Child Protective Services, and politicians still nurse battle wounds from the elections that followed.

So it took me aback yesterday morning, at a meeting for all the coalitions for children that Texans Care convenes, when the Center for Public Policy Priorities' senior fiscal analyst Dick Lavine said, "2003 was minor compared to what next year will be like, I'm afraid. The better comparison is the eighties..."

If you have followed the news on kids this week, you might have heard by now that the Annie E. Casey Foundation released its annual rankings of child wellbeing in the states, The 2010 KIDS COUNT Data Book. Once again, Texas performed worse than most other states. Our partners and friends at the Center for Public Policy Priorities coordinate the data for Texas, and I got to attend the release event Tuesday. Some important lessons lie in both Dr. Frances Deviney's presentation and the larger report.