"Cumulative risks of confirmed maltreatment & foster care placement for Am. children"

Health Policy Workshop with Christopher Wildeman, PhD
Associate Professor of Sociology, Yale University

March 6, 2014
Noon - 1:15 p.m.
Class of 1930s Room, Rockefeller Center
 

Researchers have traditionally paid little attention to the role child maltreatment and foster care placement play in shaping child health and racial/ethnic disparities in child health, presumably because they assume that both of these events are rare. I use synthetic cohort life tables and data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) and the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) to show that confirmed maltreatment and foster care placement are much more common and unequally distributed than often thought. First, I show that few children have a confirmed maltreatment case in any given year (<1%) or are in foster care on any given day (<1%), consistent with previous research using these datasets to estimate daily or yearly risks of these events. Second, I show that the risk of having a confirmed maltreatment case (~12%) or being placed in foster care (~6%) at any point between birth and age 18 is strikingly high, suggesting that these events might have larger macro-level implications for child health than is typically assumed. Third, I show that confirmed maltreatment and foster care placement are sufficiently unequally distributed—with African American children having cumulative risks of confirmed maltreatment in excess of 20% and White children having cumulative risks of this event closer to 10%, for example—that these child welfare outcomes may also shape racial/ethnic disparities in child health. Taken together, the results of these analyses suggest that researchers interested in child health should dedicate more attention to how confirmed child maltreatment and foster care placement affect children.
 

Sponsored by The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice
and The Nelson A. Rockefeller Center