While child protective services workers spend a lot of time working with troubled families, a new study from the University at Buffalo finds those workers need new tools to spot families in which there is chronic child neglect.
The study was done by two assistant professors at the School of Social Work, who worked as social workers before their university positions. They were allowed to study how an unnamed social services department operates.
Both Annette Semanchin Jones and Patricia Logan-Greene say the department they studied is making changes to spot chronic cases, so those families can get the array of help they need. That requires a comprehensive assessment to spot chronic cases, but Logan-Greene says there is no agreement on what is chronic neglect.
"One of the key indicators on which there seems to be agreement is that it should cross multiple developmental periods," said Logan-Greene. "So it might occur in infancy and then into toddlerhood, perhaps into early childhood or toddlerhood and childhood."
The researchers say poverty also is key, so a family who chronically neglects a child may need a variety of assistance. The families in their study had at least four-different stressors and some had more.
Semanchin Jones says caseworkers need help identifying families that have had prior interaction with Child Protective Services.
"Some (of the cases studied) had up to 20 repeated reports of neglect. So these were families where things did not go as planned or did not go as hoped," Jones said. "So we were more focused on what were some of the missed cues? What might have gone better, here?"
Their study suggests the system fails to look for patterns involving a single family, using something as basic as a checklist that spots recurring problems and refers the case to specially trained case workers to check for potential chronic child neglect.
