The aim of this project is to study the relationships between economic factors and child neglect. The research will investigate how parental resource- in the form of parental presence or absence, time, and money- affect both physical and emotional neglect of children under the age of five. The work will also examine how parental resources interact with other factors that affect child neglect, including parental stress and depression, and community characteristics such as community poverty, neighborhood, cohesion, social control and violence. A major focus of the research will be the effects on neglect of public policies, such as welfare programs and child support enforcement, which influence parental resources. New data will be collected to investigate these issues. A special neglect module will be added to an on-going panel study, The Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study. This study follows a birth cohort of 3,675 children born to unwed parent, and 1,125 children born to married parents, from twenty-one US cities in fifteen states. The sample is representative of non-marital births to woman in medium and large cities nationally, and collects extensive socioeconomic information through telephone interviews. The neglect module that will be added to the Fragile study will be administered through in-home assessments when the children under study are 30 and 48 months old. The assessments will provide first-hand information on the child's physical environment and the quality of parenting and parent-child interactions. The information from the neglect module, when combined with the extensive socioeconomic data from the Fragile Families study, will be a unique and valuable resource for the study of child neglect.
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