Children Caring for Themselves and Child Neglect

Assessing the New Federalism Discussion Paper No. 06-03

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Deciding when to leave a child home alone to care for him- or herself is a decision that every parent, at one time or another, must make. Determining how long a child can care for him- or herself is equally as challenging for families. According to the 1999 National Survey of America's Families, over 3.3 million school-age children regularly spend time caring for themselves (Vandivere et al. 2003). For some families leaving a child alone is often a necessity because of a lack of child care or other options. For others, leaving children alone is a symptom of parental neglect owing to any number of causes. Further, some evidence suggests that lack of supervision cases are highly correlated with child fatalities (Jones 1987). Understanding the differences between these situations is a challenge for child protective services agencies.

The Urban Institute conducted an exploratory study to examine how local child welfare agencies respond when they receive reports of children who are taking care of themselves ("selfcare"), including how they determine whether unsupervised children are victims of child neglect. Through a variety of data collection methods, the study was intended to illuminate the choices that child welfare agencies make every day in handling child neglect referrals. The study included an extensive literature review, interviews and focus groups with child protective services staff in three local Washington, D.C., metropolitan social services agencies, and a review of neglect intake referral forms in one local agency.¹

Important to the discussion of how local child welfare agencies decide when "self-care" becomes child neglect are the legal, policy, and practice guidelines that help to inform caseworkers' decisions. Equally important are the case-specific factors that caseworkers take into consideration. Because of the extraordinary complexity of these issues, the study was not intended to reach definitive conclusions, but rather to help define and focus future research.

Notes from this section of the report

1 The three local child protective services agencies where focus groups were held were Prince George's County, Maryland; Fairfax County, Virginia; and the District of Columbia. Intake referrals were reviewed in Prince George's County.

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