The Impact of Child Welfare System Involvement on Parents

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Much of the debate on the future of the child welfare(CW)/child protective services (CPS) system focuses on children’s impacts in terms of health and safety. Despite that parents, families, and communities form the basis for child safety, evidence documenting the system’s impacts on these populations is scarce and urgently needed. This proposed panel addresses this void in the literature by investigating the impact of the system on the lives of parents and caretakers. The four papers vary in their methodological approaches including in the indicators and outcomes of focus, yet all four offer novel insight into the overarching question about the impact of child welfare system involvement on parents.

The first paper in the panel provides an overview of parental impacts by examining the association between varying levels of system contact with parental wellbeing (Taber). Leveraging longitudinal data, Taber’s paper explores patterns in parental wellbeing indicators at three time points within the 36 months following system contact. The paper offers an important contribution by highlighting variation in parental wellbeing across parent and child race, household income, maltreatment allegations, and case outcomes.

The second paper (Merritt), focuses on mandated reporting policy, the precursor to systems involvement.  Given that historical racism is entrenched in mandated reporting policies and reflected in implicit bias among reporters, Merritt highlights the impacts of mandated reporting on Black parents and families. Using a mixed methods approach, Merritt’s phenomenological study design elicited the lived experiences of Black mothers impacted by CPS in the U.S. and harnessed deductive analysis leading to the identification of specific pathways through which  Black parents avoid interactions with mandated reporters.

The third paper (Kaiser) uses longitudinal data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study and fixed-effects models to assess the impact of Child Protective Services (CPS) involvement on caregiver mental and physical health. By isolating within-person changes over time, it examines how low-level encounters with CPS can affect caregiver wellbeing, with implications for understanding the broader role of child welfare system contact in shaping health disparities.

Finally, Pac, Berger, and Cancian examine the impact of children's foster care placement – the most invasive, yet infrequent form of involvement— on mothers. Findings on the impacts of such removal on children are mixed and on parents remains largely unknown. Through a instrumental variables design that leverages variation in removal tendency across quasi-randomly assigned cases, the paper recovers the causal effects of removal on a variety of parental outcomes such as physical and mental health diagnoses and treatment.

This panel engages in a deep exploration of the potential impact of CPS contact on parents. The variation in focus and methodology paints a multidisciplinary, comprehensive picture of the experiences of parents following contact. Additionally, the culmination of knowledge gleaned across papers highlights an often-ignored subpopulation within the child welfare system: parents. Through this focus, the panel will point to many potential avenues for future research as well as a variety of potential policy implications.

Policy Area

• Family and Child Policy

Chair

• Maria Cancian, Georgetown University McCourt School

Discussants

• Will Joseph Schneider, University of Illinois

• Jocelyn Wikle, Brigham Young University

Organizer

• Kathryn Taber, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Individual Presentations

• Patterns of Parental Wellbeing Following Child Welfare System Contact: NSCAW Data - Presenting Author: Kathryn Taber, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Mandated Reporting and Child Welfare Surveillance: Protection or Subordination - Non-Presenting Co-Author: Darcey H Merritt, The University of Chicago; Presenting Author: Julie Halverson, University of Toronto

• The Effects of CPS Involvement on Caregiver Mental Health, Employment, and Income - Presenting Author: Daniela E Kaiser, University of California Irvine

• Collateral Harm or Help? The Effect of Foster Care on Mothers - Presenting Author: Jessica Erin Pac, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Lawrence M. Berger, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Maria Cancian, Georgetown University McCourt School; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Christine Piette Durrance, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Runshi Tang, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Jenna Nobles, University of California, Berkeley