Do maltreated children who remain at home function better than those who are placed?

Abstract

The majority of children in the child welfare system remain with their maltreating parents, yet little is known about their level of functioning and whether they are in need of mental health intervention. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the mental health functioning of an ethnically diverse sample of 302 maltreated children and 151 non maltreated children ages 9-12 to see if there were differences between those who remained at home, those placed in kin care, nonrelative foster care or a comparison group of children who were not maltreated. Children were evaluated on multiple measures of mental health functioning, both self report and caregiver report. Results showed that the maltreated children did not differ by placement type but did score significantly higher than the comparison children on many measures. There were substantial numbers of maltreated children scoring in the clinical range of measures in all placement types with over 60% of those remaining with birth parents being seen as functioning at a level that indicated a need for mental health intervention. While fewer comparison children had scores indicating a need for mental health care, the numbers were higher than noted in national studies. Implications of the findings are presented.

Infant Placement in Canadian Child Maltreatment-Related Investigations

“…Concerns about the child's behavioural, cognitive, emotional and physical health have consistently been shown as important in substantiation and placement decisions (e.g., McConnell et al 2011;Mennen et al 2010;Tonmyr et al 2010a;Trocmé et al 2004). Among the variables we tested, only toxicology at birth showed an increased association with placement.…”

“…An earlier analysis of 9 to 12 year-olds found that maltreatment type did not influence placement decisions in Los Angeles (Mennen et al 2010). The authors suggested that the maltreatment form that triggered the initial investigation may not be indicative of the form of maltreatment that was identified following an investigation.…”

Out‐of‐Home Care versus In‐home Care for Children Who Have Been Maltreated: A Systematic Review of Health and Wellbeing Outcomes

“…Cohorts included the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Wellbeing (NSCAW, Berger et al ., 2009; Casanueva et al ., ; Cheng and Lo, ; Hurlburt et al ., ; Kolko et al ., ; Leslie et al ., , ; Raghavan et al ., ; Ringeisen et al ., ; Stacks et al ., ; Stahmer et al ., ; Traube et al ., ; Wall and Kohl, ) and the NSCAW‐II (Font and Maguire‐Jack, ; Fowler et al ., ; Horwitz et al ., ), a data‐set developed by Widom (DeGue and Spatz Widom, ; McMahon and Clay‐Warner, ; Widom, ), Swedish registry data (Berlin et al ., ; Vinnerljung et al ., , ), Runyan and Gould's (, ) historical cohort, a cohort used by Mennen et al . () and Negriff et al . () and five separate cohort studies (Baskin and Sommers, ; Doyle, ; Goodkind et al ., ; Lee, ; Pinto and Maia, ).…”

Parenting Attitudes, Family Environments, Depression, and Anxiety in Caregivers of Maltreated Children

“…Attending to the needs of the mothers is vital to improve the outcome of the children in their care. We have previously found that the maltreated children who remain at home have the same rates of mental health problems as those in care and many meet clinical symptom levels (Mennen, Brensilver, & Trickett, 2010; Mennen & Trickett, 2007). Given the mutual interactive effect of parent and child mental health problems (Elgar, McGrath, Waschbusch, Stewart, & Curtis, 2004), it is unlikely that children's conditions will improve without parent treatment.…”