Parenting Stress and Child Maltreatment: The Buffering Effect of Neighborhood Social Service Availability and Accessibility

Background & Purpose:

 Parenting stress has been found to be associated with increased risk for child abuse and neglect.  Additionally, a body of literature has documented associations between certain negative neighborhood characteristics and maltreatment including poverty, unemployment, and density of bars and other alcohol-serving outlets.  A limited amount of work has focused on the potentially protective impact within neighborhoods against child maltreatment and parenting stress.  The current study investigates one positive aspect of neighborhoods, access to social services.  Specifically, the study relies on Social Cognitive Theory and Stress and Coping Theory, to test whether availability and accessibility of social services are associated with lower levels of child maltreatment, and whether these aspects of services buffer the relationship between parenting stress and maltreatment.

 Methods:

 1,326 parents were recruited from WIC clinics (N=1,053) and childcare centers (N=273) in Franklin County, Ohio.  The survey consisted of questions related to child maltreatment, neighborhood conditions, and individual-level risks for maltreatment.  Parents in WIC clinics completed the survey in paper-and-pencil format while parents in childcare centers completed the survey online.  Missing data were imputed using multiple imputation with chained equations.

 The key dependent variable, child maltreatment, was estimated using the child neglect and physical abuse subscales of the Conflict Tactics Scale – Parent to Child version.  The independent variables include the perceived availability and accessibility of social services and service receipt.  These were assessed using a count of the number of different types of social services parents reported were available, that they believed they could receive help from if needed, and that they reported receiving help from in the past.  Parenting stress was measured with the Parent Stress Index-Short Form, and controls were included for parent age, race, sex, marital status, family size, economic hardship, and mental health concerns. 

 A series of multivariate Poisson regressions were conducted to account for the count nature of the child maltreatment outcome variable.  Main effect models were run separately for abuse and neglect first, and then interaction terms between the service variables and parenting stress were included to examine the moderation effect.

 Results:

 The findings suggest that service availability has a potential protective effect against physical abuse and neglect, and that service accessibility has an additional protective effect above and beyond sheer availability of services for child neglect.  Further, the availability of services has a significant moderating effect – it decreased the relationship between parent stress and physical abuse.

Conclusions & Implications:

 The study findings suggested a direct protective relationship between availability and both maltreatment types.  Enhancing accessibility of services may further decrease child neglect, above and beyond the sheer availability of services.  Increasing parent awareness of the social services available locally may decrease physical abuse and neglect.  Additionally, increasing the accessibility of services may further reduce child neglect.  Additional research is needed to understand the relationship between perceived and actual service availability.