College of Social Work, Hamilton College, 2629University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA.
School of Social Work, 12265University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD, USA.
Child Maltreat. 2021 Feb;26(1):28-39. doi: 10.1177/1077559520926568. Epub 2020 May 28.
About half of kinship families live in poverty, and one third of them receive financial assistance such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and foster care payments. This study selected children who remained in kinship care ( = 267) for three waves from nationally representative data and examined the longitudinal associations among poverty, economic pressure, financial assistance, and children's behavioral health outcomes in kinship care. Results from multilevel mixed-effects generalized linear models indicated that having economic pressure and receiving TANF were associated with increases in kinship children's internalizing and externalizing problems. Receiving TANF exacerbated the effects of poverty on children's externalizing problems, while receiving TANF buffered the negative effects of economic pressure on children's internalizing problems. However, internalizing and externalizing problems were in the normal range, on average. The results imply that child welfare workers should assess kinship families' subjective economic pressure in addition to objective poverty. Furthermore, policy makers should reconsider who receives TANF, how TANF is distributed to kinship families, and whether TANF meets kinship families' needs.
约一半的亲属家庭生活贫困,其中三分之一的家庭接受经济援助,如贫困家庭临时援助(TANF)和寄养津贴。本研究从全国代表性数据中选择了在亲属照顾下连续三波留居的儿童(=267 人),并考察了贫困、经济压力、经济援助与亲属照顾中儿童行为健康结果之间的纵向关联。多层次混合效应广义线性模型的结果表明,经济压力和接受 TANF 与亲属儿童内化和外化问题的增加有关。接受 TANF 加剧了贫困对儿童外化问题的影响,而接受 TANF 缓冲了经济压力对儿童内化问题的负面影响。然而,内化和外化问题平均处于正常范围。研究结果表明,儿童福利工作者除了评估客观贫困外,还应评估亲属家庭的主观经济压力。此外,政策制定者应重新考虑谁接受 TANF、TANF 如何分配给亲属家庭以及 TANF 是否满足亲属家庭的需求。