Poverty, Social Disadvantage, and Child Welfare Involvement: Service Provider Perspectives

Background and Purpose. This study examines the link between poverty, social disadvantage, and involvement with a large city’s child welfare system (CWS), and this paper focuses on the role of prevention service providers. The City’s child welfare agency contracts with community-based agencies to serve families with case management, resource navigation, referrals to other services, parenting skills, and material supports. Families are either referred to providers by the child welfare agency after a child maltreatment investigation or through a self or community referral. We spoke in-depth with staff from prevention service providers that work directly with families involved in the CWS.

Method. We applied a two-stage sampling strategy – creating an index of social disadvantage, selecting communities by levels of social disadvantage and then providers serving families living in high-disadvantage communities. We held focus groups with 30 direct service staff from five prevention service providers in these communities. We asked the staff about their service provision; how they see poverty as a factor that influences their approach to serving families; and what connection they see between their services and future involvement with the child protection system (CPS).

Results. Provider staff identified housing as families’ most common economic hardship followed by employment and food insecurity. Prevention services providers saw their role as addressing both economic hardship and family wellbeing, which they believed could help families avoid coming to the attention of the CPS. Staff felt confident supporting clients with discrete, short-term hardship (such as food insecurity), but spoke of parents with unmet needs even after receiving services. Staff mentioned strategies to help prevent or reduce CPS involvement, but generally did not view their organizations as a definitive way to prevent it or to permanently impact clients’ persistent hardship. Once a client left services, staff had no way to continue to support them, nor did they have any way to know the outcome of services received.

Conclusions and Implications. Prevention services systems seek to address families’ basic needs when lack of resources poses a risk to child safety. Prevention services can be designed to address economic as well as non-economic needs, but their ability to do so is resource constrained. When we asked providers to reflect on families’ needs, we came away with the sense that hardship, in its various forms, is persistent. Family preservation-type services often stress short-term, crisis-oriented assistance. Short-term, single-prong interventions will help some but not all families. Our impression after talking with providers leaves us asking about a longer-term commitment to families, such as a greater supply of high-quality childcare and housing in high-hardship communities. We recognize that these are already priority areas of investment, but our evidence reinforces their importance. Further research is needed on the factors that attract families to and keep them engaged in services.