Abuse and Neglect: Looking Toward the Future

This information was taken directly from Child Welfare Information Gateway

Looking Toward the Future

Achieving stronger impacts with young children and their families will require continued efforts at developing and testing a broad array of prevention programs and systemic reforms. No one program or one approach can guarantee success. Although compelling evidence exists to support early intervention efforts, beginning at a time a woman becomes pregnant or gives birth, the absolute “best way” to provide this support is not self-evident. The most salient protective factors or risk factors will vary across populations as well as communities. Finding the correct leverage point or pathway for change for a specific family, community, or State requires careful assessment in which the final prevention plan is best suited to the needs and challenges presented by each situation.

As the prevention field moves forward, current strategies, institutional alignments and strategic partnerships need to be reevaluated and, in some cases, altered to better address current demographic and fiscal realities. Key challenges and the opportunities they present include the following:

Improving the ability to reach all those at risk: The most common factors used to identify populations at risk for maltreatment include young maternal age, poverty, single parent status and severe personal challenges such as domestic violence, substance abuse, and mental health issues. Although such factors are often associated with elevated stress and reduced capacity to meet the needs of the developing child, no one of these factors is consistently predictive of poor parenting or poor child outcomes. In addition, families that present none of these risk factors may find themselves in need of preventive services as the result of a family health emergency, job loss, or other economic uncertainties. In short, our ability to accurately identify those who will benefit from preventive services is limited and fraught with the dual problems of overidentification and underidentification. Building on a public health model of integrated services, child abuse prevention strategies may be more efficiently allocated by embedding such services within a universal system of assessment and support.

Determining how best to intervene with diverse ethnic and cultural groups: Much has been written about the importance of designing parenting and early intervention programs that are respectful of the participant’s culture. For the most part, program planners have responded to this concern by delivering services in a participant’s primary language, matching participants and providers on the basis of race and ethnicity, and incorporating traditional child rearing practices into a program’s curriculum. Far less emphasis has been placed on testing the differential effects of evidence-based prevention programs on specific racial or cultural groups or the specific ways in which the concept of prevention is viewed by various groups and supported by their existing systems of informal support. Better understanding of these diverse perspectives is key to building a prevention system that is relevant for the full range of American families.

Identifying ways to use technology to expand provider-participant contact and service access: The majority of prevention programs involve face-to-face contact between a provider and program participant. Indeed, the strength and quality of the participant-provider relationship is often viewed as one of the most, if not the most, important determinant of outcomes. Although not a replacement for personal contact, the judicial use of technology can help direct service providers offer assistance to families on their caseload. For example, home visitors use cell phones to maintain regular communication with parents between intervention visits; parent education and support programs use videotaping to provide feedback to parents on the quality of their interactions with their children; and community-based initiatives use the Internet to link families with an array of resources in the community. Expanding the use of these technologies and documenting their relative costs and benefits for both providers and program participants offer both potential costs savings as well as ways to reach families living in rural and frontier communities.

Achieving a balance between enhancing formal services and strengthening informal supports: Families draw on a combination of formal services (e.g., health care, education, public welfare, neighborhood associations, and primary supports) and informal support (e.g., assistance from family members, friends, and neighbors) in caring for their children. Relying too much on informal relationships and community support may be insufficient for families unable to draw on available informal supports or who live in communities where such supports are insufficient to address their complex needs. In contrast, focusing only on formal services may ignore the limitations to public resources and the importance of creating a culture in which seeking assistance in meeting one’s parenting responsibilities is the norm. Those engaged in developing and implementing comprehensive, prevention systems need to consider how they might best draw on both of these resources.

Identifying and testing a range of innovations that address all of these concerns and alternatives is important. Equally challenging, however, is how these efforts are woven together into effective prevention systems at local, State, and national levels. Just as the appropriate service focus will vary across families, the appropriate collaborative partnerships and institutional alignments will differ across communities. In some cases, public health services will provide the most fruitful foundation for crafting effective outreach to new parents. In other communities, the education system or faith community will offer the most promising approach. And once innovations are established, they will require new partnerships, systemic reforms, or continuous refinement if they are to remain viable and relevant to each subsequent cohort of new parents and their children.

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Citation

Child Welfare Information Gateway. (2011). Child maltreatment prevention: Past, present, and future. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Children’s Bureau.

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