Parenting at the Intersection of Intellectual Disability and Race: Prevalence and Child Welfare Involvement

Background. Parents with intellectual disability experience differential treatment in American society. However, there is a dearth of information about parents with intellectual disability in the general population, and how intellectual disability relates to child welfare. The current research begins to address these gaps by estimating the prevalence of intellectual disability in mothers in the general population. We also compare rates of child welfare involvement for mothers with and without intellectual disability and examining whether intellectual disability is associated with disproportionate child welfare scrutiny while accounting for race and poverty.

Methods. Data for this study was obtained from the Fragile Families Child and Wellbeing Study. Mothers with intellectual disability (n=66) were compared to mothers without (n=2,202) on demographic and child welfare factors using national replicate weights. Descriptive statistics were used to compute disproportionality ratios. Post-hoc analysis was done to provide context to findings.

Results. Mothers with intellectual disability make up approximately 1.5% of the population of primary caregivers in urban areas. Mothers with intellectual disability are more likely to be poor or extremely poor and Black than their non-disabled peers. Mothers with intellectual disability were more than twice as likely than those without disability to have child welfare involvement by the time their children were 5; however, that disproportionality disappeared by the time children were 15. Mothers with intellectual disability who were Black were nearly 5 times as likely to have child welfare involvement than non-disabled White mothers by the time their children were 5, and that disproportionality diminished over time. By the time children were 15, child welfare involvement was high for all groups.

Conclusions and Implications. There is a disproportionate representation of poor, Black mothers in the population of primary caregivers with intellectual disability. Our findings indicate that there is an over-representation of mothers with intellectual disability who are involved in child welfare, particularly when children are young. Systemic efforts to ameliorate poverty would likely reduce child welfare involvement for all families, but particularly those with multiple marginalized identities.