Although the relationship between economic hardship and child welfare system involvement seems straightforward, it is far more complicated. Our study, which was commissioned by New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), examines the relationship between hardship and child welfare system involvement.
To better understand this relationship, we first looked at the connections between community-level poverty, social disadvantage, and contact with the child welfare system. We also asked families how they think hardship played a role in their involvement with the child welfare system, and we asked providers how they think hardship influenced their approach to serving families.
Why This Matters
Child welfare systems have been shifting focus upstream to prevent child protection system (CPS) involvement and doing so requires a better understanding of the reasons families become involved with the system. However, the relationship between economic hardship and CPS involvement is complex. On average, families encountering the child welfare system tend to have lower incomes, and rates of child welfare system involvement are highest in the sections of New York with the highest concentrations of families with incomes below the poverty level. Among families who are involved with child welfare services, co-occurring conditions such as substance misuse and mental health challenges, which hardships exacerbate, are also correlated with child welfare system involvement regardless of income. This comingling of potential causes makes the singular role of hardship difficult to pinpoint. Although there is much research on the relationships between different forms of economic hardship, it is still difficult to establish the causal link between conditions of economic hardship and child welfare involvement, due to the complexity of factors.
The study set out to describe some of the hardships, child welfare system experiences, and community conditions of families known to the child welfare system. Understanding if, when, and how community context interacts with services and child welfare system experiences can bring us closer to knowing how the child welfare system can better support families and communities before they reach CPS. This knowledge can help policymakers understand how to alleviate the hardships that lead to the child welfare system’s front door. When doing so, it is important to first note that communities have protective capacities that help families manage the challenge of raising children. Investments that target those protective capacities are a starting point and we discuss areas for future policy and research attention.
What We Found
When speaking with families and providers, we heard that most parents did not believe their recent hardship explained the opening of their child welfare case. Current hardships felt more urgent and numerous to parents than those in the past or future, and housing was the most pressing need for almost all families. Provider staff generally did not view their organizations as a definitive way to prevent future ACS involvement. Once a client left services, staff had no way to continue to support them.
When considering hardship and child welfare involvement at the community level, we saw that elevated economic hardship is related to higher rates of maltreatment (investigations and substantiated investigations) and foster care placement. Communities with high levels of social disadvantage often experience high levels of poverty and vice versa. In general, Black and Hispanic child poverty rates are higher than the poverty rates for White children. Communities facing steep economic challenges tend to use more prevention services. Overall, placement rates have declined since 2015, with a noticeable dip in 2020 coinciding with the pandemic. Although they have recovered somewhat in 2022, they remain below prepandemic levels (2015–19).
How We Did It
The study consists of two substudies. For the first substudy, we assessed hardship and child welfare system involvement at the community level using an ecological lens. With New York City’s community districts (CDs) serving as the unit of analysis, we asked whether contact with the child welfare system is correlated with poverty and social disadvantage. The second substudy involved interviews with two stakeholder groups: families involved with the child welfare system and staff of prevention services agencies that work directly with families.
We determined the population-level risk of involvement using various social indicators that are correlated with child welfare system contact. We used those indicators to construct a social disadvantage index at the CD level. We spoke with families (n = 30) who were living in CDs where the rates of contact with the child welfare system were high. We spoke with staff from five provider agencies delivering family support services in those same CDs. To describe child welfare system involvement, we adopted a definition that splits the system into two primary functions. The child protection function includes reports, investigations, and report dispositions (substantiated or not); referrals to services that address issues raised during the investigation; and foster care placement when warranted. The services function includes community and self-referrals to services designed to avoid involvement with child protection (i.e., services offered before any other involvement with the child protection side of the child welfare system). For family interviews, we sampled families based on their history of involvement, divided into two primary trajectories or pathways. The first pathway involved families that began their experience with the child welfare system through a CPS investigation. The second pathway involved families started down the services pathway. These are families whose initial involvement with services happened before any other protective services contact.
