States are seeing quality preschool as a good investment, but the economy has not been kind to funding for state preschool efforts. Recent state funding for preschool dropped or remained flat in 16 out of 19 states where data was available, cutting the numbers of children served and/or money for efforts to improve quality in the programs. Linda Jacobson's brief for the Education Writers Association provides an overview and questions reporters can ask to explore preschool funding and programs in their own states.

Summertime means no school. For many families this means they need to find childcare. Health A to Z offers strategies for finding and keeping a good sitter.

Here is a great, creative list of activities for children of all ages. Children can create their own garden or design their own tee shirt; this article offers inexpensive, inventive ideas to help your children get through the long summer days.

Creativity and independence are great skills that children can develop in the summer when schedules are less hectic. Here is a list of easy, inexpensive, summer crafts a child can do almost entirely on his or her
own.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children has put
together a list of ideas of summer activities for caregivers and children to do together. Most of these activities are free and incorporate fun and learning.

Here's a scary thought: 42,819 5-year-olds -- 1 percent of all kindergarteners -- are home taking care of themselves after school. The Afterschool Alliance reports that while most children are in the care of an adult after school, millions of elementary and secondary school kids spend an average of 7 hours a week caring for themselves. Only 11 percent are in after-school programs, though many more would participate if they could afford them or find suitable programs in their community.

The National Collaboration for Youth offers toolkits supporting the need for partnerships between schools and community-based organizations.

To promote high quality research in child care and early education and its use in policymaking, the National Center for Children in Poverty, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan, and the Child Care Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have launched the National Center for Child Care and Early Education Research Connections Web site. Designed to serve researchers and policymakers, the site is built on a relational database and includes a searchable research collection, data sets for secondary analysis, specially developed syntheses, and a 50-state data tool to compare policies within and across states.

This article in Pediatrics, "Early Television Exposure and Subsequent Attentional Problems in Children," examines the first-ever study linking early television watching with later attention and concentration problems. Researchers from the University of Washington found that, for children age 3 and younger, every hour of television they watched led to a 10-percent increase in the likelihood of attention problems at age 7. Even before their first birthday, kids watch more than 2 hours of television a day.

If you care about children, it's time to take up the challenge of understanding what federal budget trends mean for the programs aimed at helping children and families. As the annual budget battle continues in Washington, D.C., Urban Institute senior fellow Eugene Steuerle explains why children's programs are getting squeezed.