Pathways from Social Cohesion to Child Maltreatment: The Mediating Role of Social Support, Depression, and Parenting Stress

Background and purpose: Neighborhood social cohesion relates to common bonds, trust, and feelings of support between neighbors.  When parents are able to rely on their neighbors to help meet their physical and emotional needs of both themselves and their children, this sense of cohesion may have a preventive role in child maltreatment. 

In some of the early neighborhood work, it was found that residents of neighborhoods with higher rates of maltreatment had lower levels of neighborhood social cohesion, with reports that their neighbors were less likely to assist with childcare and less likely to engage in neighborhood exchanges compared to residents in neighborhoods with lower rates of maltreatment. In more recent work, it was found that perceptions of social cohesion were directly related to physical assault and indirectly related to neglect.

Much of the prior literature has focused only on the direct relationship between neighborhood social cohesion and maltreatment, without examining potential mediators to improve our understanding of why these connections between neighbors are so important.  The current study seeks to understand the pathways through which neighborhood social cohesion is associated with child abuse and neglect, by examining direct associations as well as indirect pathways through social support, parent stress, and parent depression. 

Methods: The data come from the Franklin County Neighborhood Service Study.  The full sample consists of 1053 parents from Women, Infants and Children clinics and 279 from four licensed childcare centers in Franklin County, Ohio.   The sample is limited to 1,119 parents who had complete data for all study variables that were analyzed.  A structural equation model was used to estimate the relationship between neighborhood social cohesion and child abuse and neglect, with mediating pathways through social support, parenting stress, and parent depression.  Control variables for marital status, race, age, and economic hardship were included.

Results:Neighborhood social cohesion was associated with higher levels of social support (β=0.30), which was, in turn, associated with lower levels of parenting stress (β=-0.14) and parent depression (β=-0.27). Lower levels of parent depression and parenting stress were associated with lower levels of neglect (β=2.77 and 1.28), and physical abuse (β=3.14 and 1.60); while verbal abuse was associated only with parent depression (β=7.90).  Moreover, parent’s depression was positively associated with parenting stress (β=0.16), suggesting that depression had both direct and indirect impacts (mediated by parenting stress) on neglect and physical assault, but had a direct impact on psychological aggression.

Goodness of fit tests suggested that the model was well fitted (RMSEA=0.03<0.05, SRMR=0.02<0.05, GFI=0.99 and AGFI=0.98)

Conclusions and Implications: Neighborhood social cohesion and social support were indirectly associated with child maltreatment (through parenting stress and parent depression), which suggests that improving connections between neighbors may decrease child maltreatment.  By examining the mediating mechanisms, this study contributes to the literature on the community context of child maltreatment through increasing our understanding of the pathways through which these neighborhood processes affect families and, ultimately, impact child maltreatment behaviors.