Geographically Accessible Immigration and Parenting Services: Do They Reduce Child Maltreatment?

Purpose: One out of every four U.S. children has a foreign-born parent. These children often face considerable adversity, such as material hardship and behavioral health problems, but they are less likely than children of U.S.-born parents to participate in supportive services like early childhood education. ‘Immigration stress’ is triggered by the loss of one’s home culture, exposure to anti-immigrant hostility, and the difficult process of adjusting to new cultural norms, values and languages. Because of immigration stress, immigrant parents are at-risk for depression and anxiety, which can interfere with their parenting. Parent-child conflict is common in immigrant families because children are likely to adopt the new culture more rapidly than their parents, frequently leading to sharp disagreements about appropriate behavior and roles. Research finds that parent-child conflict, stress, material hardship, and limited access to support services are risk factors for child maltreatment. However, the effects of immigration on child maltreatment remain understudied, and research on the relationship between the availability of supportive services for immigrant parents and child maltreatment is non-existent. This paper starts to fill this gap by presenting an exploratory, neighborhood-level analysis of the association between access to immigration and parenting services and child maltreatment.

Methods: We employ a cross-sectional ecological research design and spatial error regression modeling to measure the relationship between geographic access to immigrant and parenting services and neighborhood rates of child maltreatment among the 2,052 neighborhoods (Census tracts) that comprise ‘mainland’ Los Angeles County. Our main predictors are defined as the Euclidean distance from the geographic center of each tract to the nearest immigration and parenting service locations. Service location data were obtained from the Rainbow Resource Directory, which includes more than 20,000 free and low-cost social service listings in Southern California. Our dependent variable is the 5-year (2010-2014) annualized average number of children reported to Child Protective Services for suspected maltreatment per 1,000 child Census tract residents. We also control for several neighborhood-level correlates of child maltreatment, such as poverty rates, population density, racial/ethnic composition, child care burden and immigrant concentration.

Results: Our study results indicate that neighborhoods with more proximal immigration services have lower rates of child maltreatment (b = .04, p < .01), while proximity to parent support services is associated with higher rates of child maltreatment (b = -.06, p < .01). Additionally, neighborhoods with higher concentrations of Hispanic and poor residents have higher rates of child maltreatment, while neighborhoods with more white and Asian residents have lower rates of child maltreatment.

Conclusions & Implications: These findings suggest that immigration services may be a child maltreatment prevention resource. Future research should attempt to confirm this conclusion and further test the underlying logic of our study by measuring the relationship between the availability of immigrant services and maltreatment rates specifically for children in immigrant families. If this research corroborates our findings, child welfare agencies should consider partnering with immigration service providers to increase the geographic accessibility of these services in neighborhoods with high rates of maltreatment among children of immigrants.