Poverty, Social Disadvantage, and Child Welfare Involvement: Parent Perspectives

Background and Purpose. This study sought to describe some of the hardships, child welfare system (CWS) experiences, and community conditions of families known to the CWS, and this paper focuses on the issue from the families’ perspective. Hardship – a richer construct than poverty – has several dimensions. The nature of hardship is domain (i.e., housing, income, food insecurity) and duration specific. Hardships may also be interrelated. For example, a job loss may trigger a change in income followed by housing instability and food insecurity. We spoke in-depth with families involved with the CWS to learn about their experience with hardship, CWS involvement, and service receipt.

Method. We sampled in two stages – selecting communities by hardship levels and then parents living in high-hardship communities by their CWS trajectory. We interviewed 30 parents who had either experienced a first-time child protective services (CPS) investigation or a community- or self-referral to prevention services six months prior. We used a diachronic method, asking families at a single point in time to think both reflectively and prospectively. Reflective life evaluation includes the past and the present lived experience. Prospective life evaluation imagines expectations for the future. We asked families about the nature of the hardships they were facing and how long the hardships were affecting their lives. We asked specifically about the hardships preceding their involvement with the child welfare system. We also asked whether their view of their lives and the intersection with hardship had changed.

Results. Parents identified housing as families’ most common economic hardship followed by employment and food insecurity. Most parents also discussed current employment difficulties—either unemployment or underemployment—that partly caused their other hardships. When organized by service trajectory, parents reported similar experiences with hardship, though parents experiencing a CPS investigation with no follow-up events reported the fewest recent hardships. Parents saw their current hardships as more numerous and complex than past or expected future problems. Parents felt that prevention services were beneficial for specific, short-term needs, but commonly spoke of unmet needs even after receiving services and felt that the services did not have a significant impact on their overall, persistent hardship. Most parents who had a CPS investigation did not believe their economic hardship played a direct role in the opening of their child welfare case.

Conclusions and Implications. Prevention services seek to address families’ basic needs when lack of resources poses a risk to child safety. Our findings corroborate other evidence that basic needs, especially housing, employment, and food, are prevalent hardships reported by families who come to the attention of the broader CWS, either through CPS or a prevention agency. But the connection between hardship and CWS involvement is not straightforward. Parents usually understood their own CWS involvement as a result of a specific event rather than a symptom of their family’s hardship. We discuss how child welfare agencies can respond to hardship more effectively, learning what families expect from services by surveying or interviewing families as part of the regular quality improvement process.