The Instable Child Care Arrangements, Child Maltreatment and Children’s Behavior Problems: A Multiple Mediator Model

Background: Many low-income single working mothers are not possible to be both employed and to care for young children at the same time. Especially, the low-income single mothers may into the labor market in order to receive cash benefits without a reasonable increase in their income and limited environment for adequately caring for young children. For these families, child care can be burden and thus may have negative related to the family’s instable child care arrangements. This may lead to an increase in the risk of child maltreatment (i.e., physical abuse, psychological abuse, neglect). In turn, these results also may impact on child behavior problems. However, there is a dearth of research on the relationship between the instable child care arrangements burden, risk of child maltreatment and children’s behavior problems among low-income single working mothers. Also, it is unclear that different types of maltreatments impact on different level of child behavior problems.

Method: Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study (FFCWS) 3-year data, the analytical sample for this study consisted of 978 single mothers in the United States. The dependent variables included child’s behavior problems (CBSL), which were measured at year-3 by the aggressive subscale. The independent variable included two variables to measure the instability in child care arrangements: the number of changes in child care providers since the child’s first birthday and the number of special child care arrangements the mother made in the last month. The mediator variables were (1) physical abuse, (2) psychological abuse, (3) neglect. We used a regression-based approach to mediation analysis with bootstrap estimation of indirect effects (Preacher and Hayes’ indirect macro for SPSS), crosstab analysis, and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), were mainly used for data analysis, using SPSS 22.0 and SPSS MICRO 3.0.

Results: A significant association between instable child care arrangement burden and both physical abuse (B = .155, p <0.00) and psychological abuse (B = .847, p <.000) were established and the association between instable child care arrangement burden and child behavior problems (B = 1.78, p < .05) was significant. Result also indicated that psychological abuse (.035; p <.05) partially mediated the relationship between instable child care arrangement burden and child behavior problems from bootstrapping (1000 samples were drawn).

Implication: Overall, this study makes a contribution by defining the impact of the instable child care arrangement burden indicators on the risks of child maltreatments, especially, psychological abuse impacts on child behavior problems. Indeed, our findings indicate that reducing of maternal psychological abuse may be a key factor in the relationship between instable child care arrangement burden and child behavior problems. Given our findings, policy and program interventions, accordingly, might focus on improving stable child care arrangement support for low-income single working mothers in order to reduce children’s behavior problems.