SACRAMENTO, Calif. – The California Legislative Children's Caucus, founded earlier this year, announced today that its members have passed 26 pro-kid bills through their houses of origin and will be advancing through the legislature. Authored by members across both chambers and both parties, the package addresses every dimension of child wellbeing. This comes as California's children face compounding federal threats to the safety net, ongoing housing instability, and documented harms from products and platforms targeting youth.
"When we founded the Children's Caucus, we made a promise: that California's Legislature would stop treating children's needs as an afterthought and start treating them as the driving force behind how we legislate and how we budget. The breadth of legislation moving with children at the center is proof that our members are keeping that promise," said Assemblymember Mia Bonta, Founding Chair of the California Legislative Children's Caucus.
The bills follow the pillars of the caucus:
Economic Security & Financial Literacy
With nearly one in every five California children living in poverty, caucus members are advancing six bills to build the infrastructure to change that. The bills hold the state accountable to cut child poverty in half, investing in proven place-based networks, protecting our social safety net from federal cuts, and ensuring no family loses critical support because of an ICE raid or an disproven bureaucratic obstacle course.
Child Welfare & Foster Care
Every child deserves stability, family, and a system that responds when they need it. These bills work to strengthen California's kin-first commitment throughout the full dependency process, clearing barriers that strand youth outside extended foster care, funding Native tribes to keep their own families together, and supporting the needs of adopted Californians.
Education & Civic Engagement
Californians overwhelmingly agree that helping students succeed and preparing them for meaningful work are the top priorities for public schools. Still, achievement gaps persist, we lack a strong bilingual teacher base, and career pathways reach only a fraction of the students who need them. These bills build the accountability infrastructure and targeted investments to close crucial education gaps.
Physical & Mental Health
The products and platforms shaping children's lives should not be exempt from basic safety standards. These bills apply that principle: requiring infant formula manufacturers to test for heavy metals and disclose results, prohibiting social media platforms with addictive design features from allowing accounts for users under 16, and shutting down the vape industry's playbook of marketing addictive products through school supplies and candy-mimicking packaging.
Youth Justice & Shared Safety
Safety requires the presence of connection, healing, and dignity. These bills put that into statute, protecting the right of young people in juvenile facilities to physical contact with their families, extending the same principle to children who visit incarcerated parents, and closing a digital loophole that has allowed those who stream or download child sexual abuse material to evade accountability.
Housing Security & Environmental Sustainability
No child can learn, grow, or thrive if their lived environment does not support them. These bills build toward that reality, creating dedicated state infrastructure to drive youth homelessness to functional zero, reaching homeless teenagers who are already in California's schools and invisible to most other systems, ensuring foster youth don't lose housing priority when they age into college, and expanding children's access to California's outdoor spaces.
Early Childhood & Childcare Access
Two-thirds of Californians support public investment in early childhood programs, but access remains out of reach for most families who need it, and existing funding too often fails to reach them. These bills address the structural failures: one requiring communities to plan for childcare the way they plan for roads and housing, and one fixing the administrative dysfunction that leaves subsidized childcare dollars sitting idle while eligible families wait.
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Assemblymember Mia Bonta represents California’s 18th Assembly District encompassing the East Bay including Oakland, Alameda, and Emeryville. She also serves as chair of the Assembly Health Committee and the California Legislative Children’s Caucus.
Courtesy photos can be found HERE.