Risk Assessments at Birth Predict Kindergarten Achievement and Involvement with Child Protective Services
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Risk Assessments at Birth Predict Kindergarten Achievement and Involvement with Child Protective Services Sarah Prendergast 1 & David MacPhee 2 Accepted: 31 October 2020 # Society for Prevention Research 2020
Abstract Screening for family risk factors at birth is one way that early childhood programs and practitioners can identify families who might benefit from prevention efforts. Some prevention programs currently use cumulative risk (i.e., total number of risk factors present) to determine eligibility for services. More recently, however, person-centered approaches that take into account combinations of risk (versus cumulative risk) have emerged as an approach that could complement current risk assessment methods and illuminate the extent to which classes of family risk are associated with different outcomes in early childhood. Grounded in ecological theory, we tested cumulative family risk and latent classes of family risk at birth as predictors of kindergarten outcomes and mother-reported involvement with Child Protective Services (CPS). Families in the Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study were included in this study if they had medical records data available at the child’s birth as well as children’s age 5 kindergarten outcomes (N = 757). Cumulative risk was positively associated with children’s attention problems, letter-word recognition skills, CPS involvement, and both covariates (i.e., child’s diagnosed disability status and mother’s ethnicity/race), but not aggression or social skill problems. In terms of latent classes, children from higher risk classes tended to fare significantly worse on kindergarten outcomes and were more likely to have reported involvement with CPS when compared to the lower risk classes. Implications are discussed related to primary prevention, the merits of screening for risk, and comparisons between cumulative risk and classes of risk approaches. Keywords Family risk . Kindergarten achievement . Child maltreatment
There is a body of evidence demonstrating that the accumulation of risk is linearly associated with multiple early childhood outcomes (e.g., Evans et al. 2013; Mackenzie et al. 2011). As such, screening for cumulative family risk at birth is one way that early childhood programs and practitioners can identify families who might benefit from prevention efforts. In a cumulative risk approach, prevention services might range from no services for families with zero risk factors to intensive intervention services for families with four or more risk factors
* Sarah Prendergast [email protected] 1
Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population, Urban Institute, 500 L’Enfant Plaza SW, Washington, District of Columbia 20001, United States
2
Colorado School of Public Health, Prevention Research Center #165, Colorado State University, 1570, Fort Collins, CO 80523, United States
(e.g., Durham Connects; Dodge et al. 2014). Although cumulative assessments have historically been used to identify high-risk families (e.g., Sameroff et al. 1987), more recent approach
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