Child Care Subsidies: Opportunities for Prevention of Child Maltreatment

Child care access shapes parental involvement in the workforce, and inherently families' economic security. Given the well-supported relationships between family economic stress and child maltreatment, we hypothesize financially accessible child care subsidies will reduce the risk of maltreatment by reducing parental stress and improving families' ability to provide for children's basic needs. States' policy components shaping financial access to child care subsidies are explored here in terms of their relationship to child maltreatment. The National Child Abuse & Neglect Data System was used to derive states' annual rates of child maltreatment (maltreatment, abuse, neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse). These act as the dependent variable in a generalized estimator equation (GEE) series. The explanatory variables in this series are four policy component variables derived from the Child Care and Development Fund Policy Database. These include: the income eligibility level for a family with three children, whether asset tests are used to determine eligibility, whether families living in poverty are exempt from copayments, and the number of sources of public support that are counted towards a family's income when determining their eligibility. Together, these policies serve as a state-year measure for financial accessibility of child care subsidies. The GEE models predict higher expected rates of maltreatment in states whose policies make it more difficult to qualify for child care subsidies (i.e., lower income eligibility levels, applying asset tests, lacking copay exemptions for families in poverty, and counting a greater number of public support sources towards a family's income).