The power of the future: Intergenerational income mobility and child maltreatment in the United States

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2021.105175Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Upward income mobility is associated with lower child maltreatment report rates.

  • Mobility is also correlated with fewer substantiations in non-metropolitan counties.

  • Macroeconomic factors that enhance economic mobility may prevent child maltreatment.

Abstract

Background

Recent research has shown that the likelihood of children experiencing intergenerational, upward income mobility depends on the community in which they are raised. Whether parents consider their children's economic chances in their parenting decisions, however, is not well understood.

Objective

To examine the relationship between county-level income mobility–distinct from income inequality and poverty–and child maltreatment.

Participants and setting

Administrative data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System: Child File for 2406 counties were merged with measures of intergenerational income mobility from Chetty et al. (2014a), including the probability that a child born in the bottom quintile of the national income distribution reaches the top quintile by age thirty.

Methods

Weighted least squares analyses were used to empirically estimate the relationship between intergenerational income mobility and child maltreatment report rates. Maltreatment reports were also divided into subgroups by age and metropolitan status.

Results

Counties where children have a greater chance of moving up the income ladder have lower child maltreatment report rates, independent from income inequality and poverty rates. This relationship is consistent across all child ages (0–17). The relationship between upward income mobility and substantiated child maltreatment is also negatively correlated among non-metropolitan counties.

Conclusions

Children experience a lower risk for maltreatment if they are more likely to move up the income ladder in adulthood. Macroeconomic factors and policies that reduce income inequality and enhance economic mobility are likely to prevent child maltreatment.

Introduction

Child maltreatment remains a pervasive problem in the United States. Approximately 37% of children are the subject of a child maltreatment investigation (Kim et al., 2017), 12% are confirmed as maltreated, and 5% are removed from their homes (Yi et al., 2020). Socioeconomic status strongly and consistently predicts child maltreatment (Belsky, 1993). Children living in low socioeconomic status families are five times more likely to be the victim of child maltreatment than children from higher socioeconomic families (Sedlak et al., 2010). Recent research shows increasing family income can reduce child abuse and neglect (Berger et al., 2017; Cancian et al., 2013; Raissian & Bullinger, 2017), and communities with more income inequality – the distance between those at the top of the income distribution and those in the bottom – have worse child health and well-being outcomes (Eckenrode et al., 2014; Olson et al., 2010).

Research indicates that growing income inequality is linked to reduced economic mobility, as the rungs of the economic ladder grow farther apart, particularly for low-income children (Chetty et al., 2017). The American Dream promises economic mobility, but rising from the bottom to the top of the income distribution is less likely in the U.S. than many other developed countries (Ermisch et al., 2011). Unequal opportunities such as how much income a child's parents have at their birth and the opportunity surrounding a child may be more important determinants of health and human capital outcomes than in earlier generations (Chetty et al., 2017).

Chetty and colleagues convincingly show that opportunity is shaped by the ecological context in which children are raised. However, it remains unclear why some counties expand opportunity while others reduce it (Donnelly et al., 2017). Perhaps being raised in areas of high and low mobility affects the parenting. For example, areas with higher mobility may offer children different developmental contexts (e.g., better schools, less crime, lower inequality). Alternatively, resource poor areas may alter the incentives for parents to invest in their children (Doepke et al., 2019). Low mobility areas may correlate to increased child maltreatment if the ecological context acts as a stressor with few opportunities or if parents' perceived incentive to invest in their children is lower. Finally, low economic mobility may also lead parents to prioritize the present over the future, hindering their ability to invest in their children's futures (Banerjee & Duflo, 2011; Cunha, Culhane, & Elo, 2013; Shah et al., 2012).

Importantly, the influence of economic mobility is linked to, but distinct from, neighborhood influences. Neighborhood poverty, in its static form, is linked to child maltreatment (Drake & Pandey, 1996), but economic mobility relates to a dynamic process: how parental income affects child income in adulthood. No existing research has directly assessed the link between intergenerational income mobility and child maltreatment. Recent research offers the opportunity for researchers to study intergenerational income mobility and its relationship on child well-being. To the extent that greater upward mobility affects risk factors for child maltreatment, the prospect of being better off financially than one's parents may serve as a protective factor for children.

To investigate if economic advancement opportunities affect child well-being, we use a restricted version of the National Child Abuse Neglect Data Systems: Child File. These data include counties with fewer than 1000 child maltreatment reports and were made available to the research team in a data pilot program. We then created a novel dataset by merging this previously inaccessible data with intergenerational income mobility data. We find that counties where children have a greater chance of moving up the income ladder have lower rates of child maltreatment. This relationship is driven by reduced reports of neglect and physical abuse. These results imply that children experience a lower risk for maltreatment if they are more likely to move up the income ladder in adulthood.

Section snippets

Inequality and parental investments in children

Parental investments (and the inability to invest) in a child are influenced by income, inequality, and mobility (Kornrich, 2016). A higher family income enables greater access to material goods (Yeung et al., 2002), provides greater ability to develop children's skills and enrich their daily learning and experiences (Corak, 2013; Kalil et al., 2016), and can be used to elicit desired behavior from children (Weinberg, 2001). High income parents are also better able to invest in nonmonetary

Child maltreatment reports

Child maltreatment data come from a restricted version of the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS): Child File, an administrative dataset on reports of child maltreatment to child welfare agencies. Importantly, the county where each report was made is not suppressed for counties with fewer than 1000 reports, as is done in the public use NCANDS: Child File. We obtained these restricted data through a micro-data pilot program administered by the National Data Archive on Child

Descriptive statistics

Table 1 presents descriptive statistics, which are weighted by the county child population. The overall child maltreatment report rate was 4678 per 100,000 children in the full sample of counties. In our analytic sample, neglect is present in about 71% of all reports, and physical abuse is present in about 24% of all reports. Sexual abuse is present in approximately 8% of reports. This distribution is similar to the national distribution of maltreatment reports. On average, in the full sample

Absolute mobility and child maltreatment

Our primary measure of mobility thus far has been the probability that a person moves from the bottom of the income distribution in childhood to the top of income distribution in adulthood (upward mobility). We next examine the sensitivity of the main results to other measures of intergenerational income mobility. First, we use a measure of absolute mobility: the expected income percentile of children whose parents were at the 25th percentile of the distribution. For example, an absolute

Discussion

In this study, we find that greater income mobility is significantly associated with lower rates of maltreatment in counties across the U.S, even after accounting for income inequality and poverty. These results are most pronounced among rates of neglect, physical abuse, and repeat maltreatment. The relationship is generally consistent across age groups. These results are also robust to various measures of income mobility.

Our findings imply that if parents view their children as having greater

Conclusion

Society has historically viewed child maltreatment as a family problem, typically offering interventions at the case or family-level. Indeed, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Committee on Child Abuse and Neglect issued a report in 2010 identifying ways to prevent child maltreatment (Flaherty et al., 2010). This report focused on individual-level actions of pediatricians, hospital-based programs, and community-level prevention programs. This perspective has been successful for

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Data acknowledgement

Some data used within this analysis were derived from National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect (NDACAN) restricted data. These data were accessible through contractual arrangements with NDACAN, and are solely available through the Cornell Restricted Access Data Center at [email protected].

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect (NDACAN) for the opportunity to participate in the microdata pilot project. We also thank the Doris Duke Fellowship for the Promotion of Child Well-Being for connecting us to each other.

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