Suchergebnisse

Economic support programs for low-income families may play an important role in preventing child abuse and neglect. In the United States, childcare subsidies are provided to low-income families who meet certain requirements to offset the high cost of childcare. States have flexibility in setting many policies related to the provision of childcare subsidies, which results in a great deal of variation in how the programs operate between states. One policy dimension on which states vary is the number of employment hours required to receive childcare subsidies. A small body of work has begun to investigate the ways in which these state policy variations might relate to child maltreatment. Using 11 years of administrative data from the United States, the current study sought to estimate the relationship between two sources of variation in childcare subsidy policies: employment requirements and copayment size; and child neglect, physical abuse, and emotional abuse substantiations. The study found a nuanced relationship between required employment and neglect substantiations. Specifically, requiring some level of work was not associated with neglect substantiations, but requiring 30 hours of employment was associated with higher rates. The study did not find a relationship between copayment size and maltreatment substantiations.

AbstractParenting shapes the development of emotion regulation skills in early childhood, laying a key foundation for social‐emotional adjustment. Unfortunately, high adversity exposure may disrupt parental emotion socialization practices and children's regulatory development. The current study used variable‐ and person‐centered approaches to evaluate links among parental emotion expressiveness, children's observed emotion regulation, and teacher‐reported adjustment among 214 4‐ to 6‐year‐old children experiencing homelessness, an indicator of high cumulative risk and acute adversity. Structured parent‐child interaction tasks were recorded on site in emergency shelters over the summer and micro‐socially coded for parent and child expressions of anger, positive affect, and internalizing distress. We anticipated that parental modeling of predominantly negative emotion expression would be associated with more child dysregulation during parent‐child interaction and worse adjustment at school, as reported by teachers the following school year. Preliminary analyses indicated that children's observed difficulty downregulating anger was associated robustly with teacher‐reported social‐behavioral problems. Latent profile analysis was used to identify three patterns of parental emotion expression characterized by above‐average expression of positive affect, internalizing distress, and anger. Parents' likelihood of membership in the elevated anger profile significantly predicted children's observed difficulty down‐regulating anger and higher social‐behavioral problems at school. In addition to ongoing efforts to reduce poverty‐related risk, supporting adaptive anger regulation in parents and young children may be important for enhancing resilience among families experiencing homelessness and similar conditions of high cumulative risk.