Joyce Lee, Assistant Professor, Social Work, Ohio State University
Title: Leveraging Fathers to Promote Child Wellbeing within the Context of the U.S. Child Welfare System
Abstract: Over 3 million reports of child abuse and neglect are made annually to the U.S. child welfare system. Children with alleged abuse and neglect reports are exposed to multiple risk factors (e.g., economic insecurity, parental substance use, domestic violence, inadequate housing) that are associated with poor health outcomes. A predominant focus on risk factors of child maltreatment has led to a limited understanding of protective factors—including fathers and their involvement with children—that may protect children against future incidents of child maltreatment and promote child health. Fathers and their protective roles have been largely ignored within the child welfare system, with the primary focus instead being on working with mothers. It is critical to engage fathers in child welfare cases because decades of research now demonstrate that father involvement is beneficial to children across multiple developmental domains. More specifically in the child welfare system context, fathers have the potential to serve as positive resources to ensure and promote the safety, permanency, and wellbeing of their children. Informed by an ecological systems framework for investigating father-child relationships, this presentation will introduce two interrelated studies: 1) a comprehensive review of ~50 years of literature that empirically examines the links between father involvement and child wellbeing in the context of the U.S. child welfare system; and 2) a secondary analysis of the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Study-Second Cohort (NSCAW-II) data to assess fathers’ warmth as a positive dimension of father involvement and its associations with the socioemotional development of children reported for child abuse and neglect. The presentation will also provide a brief introduction of a follow-up study that extends the current work and applies machine learning to the most recently released NSCAW-III data to identify key predictors of father-child contacts within the U.S. child welfare system. The presentation will conclude with insights on how some of the findings from these studies informed and contributed to submitting an R01 grant proposal to the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development.
