64P
Understanding of the Risk of Inadequate Supervision
Inadequate supervision is occurred most frequently than any other types of child maltreatment. In addition, most of child maltreatment fatalities results from inadequate supervision (Coohey, 2003; Hussey, Chang, & Kotch, 2006). Furthermore, studies have shown that children who are inadequately supervised are more likely to have substance abuse problem, developmental problem, mental health problem, and also involved in delinquency behaviors than children who are adequately supervised. In spite of its high prevalence and detrimental consequences, scant attention has been paid to the etiology of inadequate supervision. To advance the understating of inadequate supervision, using a prospective, longitudinal study design, this research explores what are predictive of inadequate supervision.
Methods:
The study sample was obtained from the Illinois Families Study (IFS), a panel study of randomly selected welfare recipients in Illinois. The final sample includes 1,099 mothers who had children younger than twelve years or younger at the time of the first interview to allow 2 years of Child Protective Service (CPS) involvement observation periods. This research takes advantage of using both CPS data and survey for assessing risk factors on subsequent inadequate supervision neglect. Inadequate supervision was operationalized by official CPS records of investigated child maltreatment reports due to inadequate supervision. Based on ecological theory, the effects of diverse variables on child, mother, and family as well as neighborhood characteristics were assessed. Logistic regression models predicting investigated CPS reports for inadequate supervision were conducted.
Results:
Mother’s depressive symptom is significantly associated with investigated inadequate supervision reports, even after controlling for demographic, economic, parenting, and psychological variables. Mothers who experienced child care burden are more likely to be investigated than mother who did not experience child care burden. In addition, having more children increase the odds of being investigated for inadequate supervision. However, mother and child’s physical health, neighborhood conditions, family’s economic hardships, and parenting stress do not appear to influence the risk of inadequate supervision.
Conclusions and Implications:
Understanding the predictors of inadequate supervision is of critical importance to identify who are at most risk and targeted interventions. Results from this study shows that mothers who have high child care demand and less dependable child care are at great risk of investigated in inadequate supervision. With general education of importance of appropriate supervision, offering comprehensive programs that provide access to dependable child care service and accessible respite care as well as psychological interventions in an effort to reduce depressive symptoms may be effective to reduce supervision neglect.