Do Early Care and Education Services Improve Language Development for Maltreated Children? Evidence from a National Child Welfare Sample

Background and Purpose: Young children birth to five-years are an over-represented population in the U.S. child welfare system (CWS). Due to their exposure to early childhood deprivation and trauma, they are also highly vulnerable to a range of developmental problems, including language delays. This is cause for concern because early language development is predictive of children’s cognitive and socio-emotional functioning and plays a vital role in children’s school readiness, literacy and ultimate academic success.

Research demonstrates that high quality early care and education (ECE) programs can improve children’s language development and so policymakers have begun calling for increased enrollment of CWS-supervised children in these programs. However, it is not a given that ECE will benefit maltreated children. Some types of maltreatment may result in trauma-related learning and behavior challenges that cause children to respond to ECE settings differently than the general population. Abuse-related problems with self-regulation may limit the positive effects of ECE. Alternatively, ECE may be especially beneficial for neglected children who often experience serious language and cognitive delays that ECE may help mitigate.

While the impact of ECE on the general and low-income populations has been studied extensively, its impact on children in the CWS has not.  We test the following hypotheses: (1) young children in the CWS who receive ECE will have better language development at an 18 month follow-up than those who did not; and (2) the type of maltreatment that brought them to the CWS’ attention will moderate the relationship between ECE and language development with neglected children benefitting from ECE more than abused children.

Methods: To test these hypotheses we conducted a secondary analysis of data from the first two waves of the second National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being II, a nationally representative and longitudinal study of 5,872 children involved with U.S. child welfare agencies. Our analysis was restricted to the children who were 0-59 months at Time 1 (n= 3,504) and utilized data from the Child, Caregiver and Caseworker interviews. OLS regression models were used to analyze whether children’s receipt of any center-based ECE at Time 1 predicted their standardized score on the Preschool Language Scale (PLS-3) 18 months later (Time 2), controlling for type of alleged maltreatment and a robust set of child and caregiver demographics. Subsequent models included interaction terms for types of maltreatment and ECE.

Results: As hypothesized, participation in ECE at Time 1 predicted more positive language development at Time 2. Additionally, there was a positive interaction between participation in ECE and both physical neglect (failure to provide) (ß = .08, p < .05) and supervisory neglect (lack of supervision) (ß = .10, p < .05).

Conclusions and Implications: Our findings indicate that ECE is beneficial for CWS-involved children’s early language development, and this is especially the case for neglected children. This supports the wisdom of recent policy efforts to increase enrollment of CWS-supervised children in ECE and points to the importance of future research exploring how ECE programs can better address the needs of abused children.