Ignore progressives: Child-welfare probes work saving kids

Are child-welfare investigations traumatic for families? How should we weigh that trauma against learning if children are in danger and ensuring parents change their behavior?New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services has limited official investigations and diverted more cases into a program offering parents “support” — but doesn’t require them to take it.The upshot: children left in unsafe homes, not to mention many gruesome child fatalities.

The push to redirect cases away from investigation and enforcement presumes families — and children themselves — suffer from these intrusions into their lives.But a new study calls that premise into question. University of Texas, University of Connecticut and Allegheny County Department of Human Services researchers explore the relationship between child-welfare investigations and child well-being.

Their working paper assesses the short-term impacts of such investigations, finding children in investigated households experience significant health benefits — fewer injuries and more preventative care — over a two-month follow-up.The researchers used data from Pittsburgh, where child-welfare investigators sift through reports of alleged child abuse or neglect with the help of a predictive risk-assessment tool.The paper examines cases just above and below the tool-generated threshold score that triggers an automatic investigation.

The findings are astounding.Children just above the threshold whose cases were investigated were 33% less likely “to have an injury-related Medicaid claim in the 60 days following a referral” than kids just below it — an effect driven by reductions in injuries at home.Not only did the study find declines in harms, it found increases of 28% and 30% in wellness visits to pediatricians and immunizations respectively, adding to an investigation’s overall protective effect.Using a host of econometric analyses, the researchers were able to confidently attribute the r...