Association of State Minimum Wage Increases with Child Maltreatment
Type
Child maltreatment negatively alters the developmental and health trajectories for far too many children in the United States. In 2019, approximately 3.5 million children received a child protective system response, (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2019). Child maltreatment is associated with deleterious consequences for physical and psychological health across the lifespan (Cicchetti & Toth, 2004). Historically, child maltreatment prevention research has focused largely on modifying relational risk factors (e.g., parenting) (Merrick & Guinn, 2018), but more recently research has shifted to examining policies and programs that address social determinants of maltreatment. Policies that intervene on the social determinants of child maltreatment may produce significant population-level effects and substantial cost-savings to the health care system (Brown et al., 2019). A synthesis of meta-analyses on child maltreatment antecedents concluded that large scale socioeconomic experiments should be tested to address the risk of low socioeconomic status of family as a risk for child maltreatment (van IJzendoorn et al., 2020). Although there are multiple, causal factors associated with child maltreatment, economic interventions could potentially reduce the risk factors for child maltreatment associated with economic stress, including parental stress and conflict (Bellazaire, 2018).