Family Earnings and Transfer Income among Families Involved with Child Welfare

The present study researched monthly income components in families from whom the child welfare system removed children to place them in out-of-home care. Using merged Washington State administrative data on 11,247 families who experienced child removal between July 2001 and June 2008, we examined wage and public assistance income. Inflation-adjusted average monthly cash income ranged from $736 to $1518 depending on how the income of a potential second parent was counted. In most configurations, average cash income fell below conservative measures of the applicable poverty line. These findings show that families involved in child welfare are on average very poor, more so than is commonly recognized, and provide new, finer-grained detail on the generally accepted relationship between poverty status and child welfare involvement.