How Child Care Access Quietly Shapes Child Welfare’s Front Door
Reducing parental stress and adding more trusted adults into a family ecosystem reduces child maltreatment
How Child Care Access Quietly Shapes Child Welfare’s Front Door
Reducing parental stress and adding more trusted adults into a family ecosystem reduces child maltreatment
By Elliot Haspel, Guest Contributor
Reducing parental stress and adding more trusted adults into a family ecosystem reduces child maltreatment
American child care debates tend to organize around two arguments.
The economic case, parental (and especially maternal) labor force attachment, and the ways in which accessible child care impacts businesses and the economy writ large.
And the early childhood development case, which focuses on how good child care, or the lack thereof, impacts the rapidly growing brains and school readiness of young kids.
There is, however, a structural blind spot in the discourse: child care access plays a load-bearing role in the infrastructure that can keep children safer and families out of the child welfare system.
The evidence is substantial, and largely absent from how child care policymakers, advocates, and funders currently calculate the case for investment.
Two Mechanisms, One Overlooked Connection
There are two primary mechanisms by which child care intersects with child welfare: parental stress, and the presence of trusted adults in a family’s ecosystem.
The stress mechanism is direct.
Reduced family well-being dramatically spikes the risk of child maltreatment; when a parent is at the end of their rope and lacks an ecosystem of support, it is more likely they will take harmful actions.
The lack of affordable and accessible child care can be an isolating hammer-blow to family well-being.
Not only are there clear effects on financial security (and therefore vital elements like housing and food stability) but research has found that managing the search for and precariousness of child care is itself a significant psychological burden.
The impacts are worst for mothers, for whom unstable, unreliable child care is correlated with harms to mental health that can last six years or more.
The second mechanism is less visible but equally important.
Child care programs are often essential hubs through which new parents build informal safety nets — friendships, emergency backup care, and key parenting knowledge such as safe sleeping practices.
When child care is inaccessible, those networks don’t form.
Sociologist Mario Small has documented how central these programs are to that connective tissue.
That social isolation, combined with precarious shift work, can also lead to reliance on unsafe care arrangements, such as leaving children home alone or with adults unequipped to care for them.
What the Data Show
When child care breaks down, the effects can be severe.
Colorado’s Child Fatality Review Team has identified so many deaths correlated with a lack of child care that it made a formal recommendation that the state ensure “affordable and accessible child care for all families.”
Between 2013 and 2017, the Team identified 223 child maltreatment deaths that might have been prevented with adequate child care available.
The positive impacts of solving America’s child care challenge on child welfare, then, are also sizable.
A research team led by Dr. Henry Puls calculated that a major national investment in child care — akin to what was proposed in the Build Back Better legislation, approximately $400 billion over six years — “might reduce” child welfare:
Investigations for suspected maltreatment by 6.4 percent,
Victimization by 6.0 percent,
Foster care entries by 3.1 percent,
Maltreatment-related fatalities by 11.6 percent.
Puls’ team applied these estimates to real child welfare data from 2014-2019 and found it would yield a “striking number of potentially safer children”:
1.3 million fewer children investigated
244,000 fewer children substantiated as victims
9,000 fewer children entering foster care
1,198 fewer deaths.
Why the Blind Spot Persists
The curious absence of child welfare from discussions of child care policy can likely be tracked to a few sources.
Child welfare and child care advocates are more cousins than siblings: they may occasionally come together, but largely live apart.
That separation is both caused by and a cause of siloed federal funding streams.
This is also a symptom of a more program-focused approach to family policy that was cemented during 1990s welfare reform, as opposed to an ecosystem approach that understands and responds to the myriad influences on family well-being.
That shift has created a structural divergence which has led to downstream fragmentation of policy and advocacy communities.
Similarly, the philanthropies which both issue communities depend on rarely work across both domains, despite often having overlapping priorities.
And economists asked to calculate the benefits of child care investments are almost never asked to incorporate the effects on child welfare, or the savings from meaningfully reduced investigatory caseloads and foster care placements.
As a result, the researchers, advocates, and messengers in each domain are optimizing for their own audiences, and the connection between the two rarely gets made or resourced.
For instance, since higher income eligibility limits for child care subsidy has been linked to lower child maltreatment rates, taking a broader view may reduce the functional cost of raising those limits and make state legislatures more inclined to fund them.
Similarly, most states give some form of subsidy priority to families who are referred by state or local welfare agencies.
But given enrollment freezes and a lack of available slots in many areas, states may need to get more creative to ensure that when such a case arises, child care needs can actually be addressed.
A Solvable Problem
The structural barriers are real but not immovable.
Philanthropies — perhaps through existing collaboratives like the Children, Youth & Family Funders Roundtable — could set tables where child care and child welfare advocates and policy experts can come together to identify a common agenda and a more comprehensive accounting of benefits.
Advocates and wonks, of course, can initiate these conversations themselves, and ensure that child welfare gains are included in their analyses.
State child welfare directors could walk across the hall to state child care administrators and have a similar conversation, and vice versa.
Congress could hold a hearing or ask the Congressional Research Service, Government Accountability Office, or relevant agencies to research the intersection to inform future thinking on policy focus and approach.
Demonstrating the stark impacts that child care has on child welfare make the stakes for decision makers clear.
Public investment in child care doesn’t just impact workforce participation or child development; it’s also an upstream factor that shapes family stability and child safety.
Decisions shaping philanthropic investment, policy design, and advocacy strategy that don’t include this awareness are missing an essential element that matters for both policy communities and, most importantly, for families.
It’s time to illuminate the blind spot.
Elliot Haspel is a Senior Fellow at Capita and author of The Family Frontier, which focuses on child care and early childhood policy.