- Melanie L. Nadon, PhD, MPA
- December 2024
Many families involved with the child welfare system are from low-income backgrounds and are often families of color. In fact, strong evidence suggests that poverty is the principal predictor of a child welfare investigation while growing causal evidence suggests that poverty drives child welfare system involvement.[1, 2, 3] These parents’ economic status makes them eligible for public benefits which they rely on in the absence of sufficient income to support themselves and their children.[4, 5]
Public assistance such as SNAP and TANF are known to reduce the likelihood of child maltreatment risk and child welfare system contact,[6, 7] but access to those supports can be reduced or lost completely when children are removed from the home as a result of a child welfare investigation. In theory, it may seem to make sense that a parent who does not currently have custody of their children should not continue to receive the same level of benefits. But in practice, such reductions may have the unintended consequences of delaying or entirely preventing family reunification—the desired result when the home environment is deemed safe for the child’s return. In a deeply trying time when families most need a supportive safety net, it is removed while they navigate their child welfare case. Moreover, the economic barriers to reunification driven by reduction of the safety net are coupled with additional financial hardships resulting from navigating the complex child welfare system, including child support[8, 9] fines and job scheduling precarity.[10, 11]
“I was getting food stamps. Then it got cut off because it was just me. I think I might’ve got a little bit still. The kids were still coming for visits and I was still having to provide food and all these things, and it put a barrier in my way. I feel like the department should be removing barriers, right?… I mean it meant that money that I was supposed to be putting towards bills and that, I had to put towards food. I mean that’s basically it. Money was—I had to rob Peter to pay Paul type of thing. This bill didn’t get paid because the kids had to eat when they came to visit, because if I can’t provide as a mother, then you continue to punish me and I don’t get my kids back. You know what I mean? It’s all a big tug of war really. It’s a power struggle I feel like.” – Stephanie, a white mother of two daughters and a son.
Policy and Practice Implications
Current public-benefit policies operate in contradiction to stated system goals aimed at improving equity in child welfare and support for low-income families with children. Policy and practice considerations to build a more equitable child welfare system and support low-income parents and their children include:
- Build safety nets and stopgaps for low-income families impacted by the child welfare system, like Illinois’ Norman Funds and Kentucky’s new Family Preservation Program.[12]
- Encourage family reunification and preservation with the provision of necessary material resources for parents during visitations, including diapers, wipes, food, and drinks.
- Ensure access to monetary resources through economic support programs, such as the growing number of basic income pilot programs nationwide.[13, 14]
- Reduce financial strains on low-income, system-impacted parents such as by ending the harmful practice of charging child support for children who enter foster care.[15, 16]
- Improve scheduling security for hourly workers through legislation, like the increasingly common “Fair Work Week” laws being implemented around the United States.[17, 18]
The contents of this brief are derived from the dissertation study The Nexus of Poverty, Place, Race, and Bureaucracy: A Multi-Method, Multi-Level Examination of Child Welfare Investigations by Melanie L. Nadon. Findings presented here are based on a qualitative study using data from 21 interviews with child welfare-impacted parents in a Midwestern state (Chapter 3).
For more information, see: Nadon, M. (2024). The Nexus of Poverty, Place, Race, and Bureaucracy: A Multi-method, Multi-level Examination of Child Welfare Investigations. The University of Chicago. https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/ record/12700?v=pdf
References
Categories
Uncategorized