The Effects of Housing Assistance on Child Maltreatment Risk: Evidence from Fragile Families

Purpose: There have been many efforts to estimate the effects of housing assistance on various child-level outcomes to better understand any potential benefits of this assistance for children in low-income families. This work has largely focused on aspects of child wellbeing that are characteristic of a child’s potential human capital, such as academic performance, graduation rates, and juvenile delinquency. However, given evidence that housing assistance may reduce parental stress by easing financial burdens or improving feelings of neighborhood safety, it is possible that housing assistance receipt may also reduce risk of child maltreatment. That is, if housing assistance reduces family stressors, parents may be less likely to engage in problematic parenting behaviors that put them at risk of involvement with child protective services (CPS). Thus, employing family stress theory, we hypothesize that housing assistance receipt will reduce a parent’s risk of child abuse and neglect as well as reduce risk of being reported to CPS.

Method: We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study at ages three, five, and nine to examine the effect of housing assistance receipt on child maltreatment risk and CPS involvement. We create measures of neglect risk, abuse risk, and CPS involvement using items from the Parent-Child Conflict Tactic Scales and the mother’s interview. In order to reduce bias in the estimate of the effect of housing assistance receipt, we instrument housing assistance receipt using a measure of housing availability. Specifically, we measure housing assistance availability as a ratio of the number of public housing and Section 8 slots available at the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) level in the twenty cities represented in Fragile Families to the number of households in each MSA who are eligible for these housing assistance types based on U.S. Census micro data, adjusted for family size. To improve the validity of the instrument, we control for multiple MSA-level characteristics that may be correlated with both availability of housing assistance and child maltreatment risk.

Results: Results indicate that housing assistance receipt reduces the risk of physical and emotional abuse, and marginally, supervision neglect. This suggests that some of the benefits commonly associated with housing assistance, such as reduced financial hardship, may serve an important role in improving family functioning. However, there is no significant effect of housing assistance on CPS involvement. This suggests that there may be a surveillance effect of utilizing public benefits such that, despite improving parenting behaviors, risk of CPS involvement does not change.

Implications: Our findings provide support for the idea that government programs which provide in-kind support to low-income families may serve as a measure of prevention for maltreatment risk. Thus, given the overrepresentation of impoverished families in the child welfare system, and particularly families with inadequate housing, we suggest that some of the costs of federal housing assistance may be offset by reductions in the variety of costs stemming from child maltreatment.