Background: Few studies have investigated whether Child Protective Services (CPS) contact influences child wellbeing, independent of underlying maltreatment and not considered as a proxy for such maltreatment.
Objective: The present study estimates the association between CPS contact and child delinquency, education, substance use, and mental health and development.
Participants and setting: The study used data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal birth cohort study of children born in 20 US cities. Study outcomes were based on age-15 interviews with the focal children and their caregivers with sample sizes ranging from 2088 to 2327 across outcomes.
Methods: The relationship between CPS contact and child wellbeing was estimated using the propensity score method of inverse probability of treatment weighting.
Results: CPS contact was associated with an 88% increase in the probability of smoking (p = .010), a 29 % increase in externalizing behavior (p < .001), a 27% increase in internalizing behavior (p = .001), a 18 % increase in the probability of being expelled (p = .32), a 7.5 % increase in a depression (p = .002), a 6.9 % increase in anxiety (p = .002), a 6.2 % reduction in happiness (p = .008), a 6.0 % increase in impulsivity (p < .001), and a 5.5 % increase in school troubles (p < .001).
Conclusions: Despite a federal mandate to improve child wellbeing, we found no evidence that contact with the child welfare system improves child outcomes. Rather, CPS contact was associated with worse mental health and developmental outcomes.
Keywords: Child protective services; Child welfare; Child wellbeing; Maltreatment.
Copyright © 2022. Published by Elsevier Ltd.