A Spatial Analysis of the Relationship Between Early Care & Education Services and Child Maltreatment

Background and Purpose: Early care and education (ECE) resources may offer a unique avenue for intervention in communities with high rates of child abuse and neglect. Young children, birth to five-years old, are the fastest growing segment of America's child welfare population (Vig et al., 2005), and thus interventions targeting this age group are greatly needed. In 2005, 43 percent of the nation's foster care population was birth to five-years old, and 77% of maltreatment-related deaths involved children less than four-years old (United States Department of Health and Human Services, 2005).

To date, the body of research examining the relationship between ECE and child maltreatment is small, but suggests that ECE may attenuate maltreatment risk. For instance, children who participated in Chicago's Parent-Child (CPC) Center preschool programs were half as likely as matched controls to become the subjects of a substantiated child maltreatment report (Reynolds & Robertson, 2003). Mothers in substance abuse treatment who experienced difficulty finding childcare for their children were more likely to report that they neglected their children (Cash & Wilke, 2003). Neighborhoods with high rates of ‘child care burden', a measure of the amount of supervision available in communities to care for children, had higher rates of child maltreatment (Coulton et al., 1995; Freisthler et al., 2007; Freisthler et al., 2005; Korbin et al., 1998) while neighborhoods with high rates of preschool utilization had lower rates of child maltreatment (Garbarino, 1976; Garbarino & Crouter, 1978).

This study builds on this research by exploring the relationship between local access to ECE resources and neighborhood rates of child abuse and neglect. It asks the question: are children living in neighborhoods with more ECE resources safer from child abuse and neglect?

Methods: This study uses a cross-sectional design, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping technology, and spatial analytic methods to assess the relationship between local and proximal ECE resources (specifically licensed child care center and family day care home ‘slots') and child maltreatment reports, substantiations, and foster care placements for all 282 zip codes in Los Angeles County, California. Spatial regression techniques were utilized to control for the potentially biasing effects of spatial autocorrelation, and spatial lag variables were incorporated into the model to account for proximal, as well as local, ECE resource availability.

Results: Preliminary results found that higher concentrations of local and proximal ECE resources were negatively related to rates of substantiated child maltreatment and foster care placement in zip codes when controlling for known neighborhood correlates of child maltreatment, including impoverishment, residential density, residential instability, and immigrant concentration.

Conclusions & Implications: These results suggest that the availability of ECE resources may deserve special attention when developing preventative interventions to reduce child abuse and neglect in high-risk communities.