State Paid Family Leave: A Tool for Infant Maltreatment Prevention

Introduction:

The United States (U.S.) is among five countries worldwide that lack a federal guarantee for maternity leave compensation. In the absence of a national paid family leave (PFL) policy, 14 states, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico have implemented state-PFL policies. Traditional arguments in support of PFL policy emphasize its positive effects on maternal labor force participation and maternal and infant health benefits. This study highlights an additional benefit that has been previously overlooked: the prevention of child maltreatment.

Research has identified a protective relationship between California’s PFL policy and hospital admission rates for pediatric abusive head trauma, a severe form of child physical abuse. However, these findings were limited to this specific sub-type of child maltreatment, and could not be generalized beyond California. Thus, this study aims to address these limitations by utilizing child welfare administrative data to examine the effects of PFL policy on all forms of infant maltreatment in four states: California, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island.

Methods:

This paper draws on data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (2002-2019), the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the U.S. Census to examine the effect of state-PFL laws on infant maltreatment treatment investigations from 2002 through 2019 (N=720 state-years). Data analyses used beta regression with generalized linear mixed effects. Models examined the relationship between state-PFL on the trajectory of infant maltreatment investigations across a sample of 40 states (36 non-PFL and 4-PFL states). Using bootstrap re-sampling to generate 500 random samples, the potential moderating effects of unemployment, proportion of adults with less than high school education, and family poverty rate were tested.

Results:

The trajectory of infant maltreatment rates in PFL states was significantly lower than in non-PFL states (B=-0.02, SE=.01, p=.02). Among PFL states, infant maltreatment rates increased by 32.04% across the study period compared to 87.56% increase among non-PFL states. Family poverty (B=-0.30, SE=.30, 95% CI= [-0.56, -0.05]), proportion of adults with less than a high school education (B=-0.51, SE=0.32, 95% CI= [-0.81, -0.250]), and unemployment (B=-0.88, SE=0.40, 95% CI= [-0.799, -0.249]) significantly moderated the effects of PFL on the trajectory of infant maltreatment rates. These findings suggest that the effects of PFL on infant maltreatment were most pronounced at higher levels of family poverty, unemployment, and proportion of adults with less than high school education.

Conclusions:

The results provide evidence that PFL protects against infant maltreatment and that PFL may be especially protective for infants in states with high levels of economic insecurity. These results can inform national and state debates about PFL policy by providing evidence of the beneficial effect on infant maltreatment rates while adding to the growing evidence that policies aimed to support household economic stability could be a vital child maltreatment prevention policy tool.