You are here

The Effect of Early Head Start on Child Welfare System Involvement: A First Look at Longitudinal Child Maltreatment Outcomes

Description: 
The high societal and personal costs of child maltreatment make identification of effective early prevention programs a high research priority. Early Head Start (EHS), a dual generational program serving low-income families with children prenatally through age three years, is one of the largest federally funded programs for infants and toddlers in the United States. A national randomized trial found EHS to be effective in improving parent and child outcomes, but its effectiveness in reducing child maltreatment was not assessed. The current study used administrative data from state child welfare agencies to examine the impact of EHS on documented abuse and neglect among children from seven of the original seventeen programs in the national EHS randomized controlled trial. Results indicated that children in EHS had significantly fewer child welfare encounters between the ages of five and nine years than did children in the control group, and that EHS slowed the rate of subsequent encounters. Additionally, compared to children in the control group, children in EHS were less likely to have a substantiated report of physical or sexual abuse, but more likely to have a substantiated report of neglect. These findings suggest that EHS may be effective in reducing child maltreatment among low-income children, in particular, physical and sexual abuse.
Record Format: 
application/pdf
2014-04-04T07:00:00Z
Subject: 
Abused children -- Statistics
Prevention -- Child abuse and neglect
Early childhood education -- United States -- Research
Head Start programs
Community Health and Preventive Medicine
Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research
Social Work
Type: 
text
Raw Url: 
http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/do/oai/?metadataPrefix=&verb=GetRecord&identifier=oai:pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu:childfamily_pub-1001
Source: 
Center for Improvement of Child and Family Services Publications
Repository Record Id: 
oai:pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu:childfamily_pub-1001
SetSpec: 
publication:childfamily
publication:communities
publication:childfamily_pub
publication:ssw
Record Title: 
The Effect of Early Head Start on Child Welfare System Involvement: A First Look at Longitudinal Child Maltreatment Outcomes
https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/childfamily_pub/2
info:doi/10.1016/j.childyouth.2014.03.044
https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/context/childfamily_pub/article/1001/viewcontent/furrer_effects_of_EHS_on_Child_Welfare_Involvement_1.pdf
Database: 
Resource OE Format: 
randomness