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Today, Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors will vote on a motion to move 103 public health nurses from the Department of Children and Family Services to the Department of Public Health.
While largely administrative, the development sets the nation’s largest child welfare system up for a much broader discussion about how public health strategies can help break the intergenerational cycles of abuse that result in preventable child maltreatment.
If Los Angeles County were to do something new on this front, it would be following the lead of the federal Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities. That body issued a report in March calling for the expanded use of home-visiting programs to prevent child maltreatment.
The commissioners were largely influenced by groundbreaking research coming out of the University of Southern California School of Social Work’s Children’s Data Network.
In 2013, the data network released a set of studies that pointed to the heightened likelihood of child abuse for babies born to teen mothers who had experienced abuse when they were children themselves.
To accomplish this, a research team led by USC’s Emily Putnam-Hornstein engaged in some complex data-linking. The team looked at all the birth records of babies born to first-time mothers ages 15 to 19 in Los Angeles County in 2006 and 2007.
Excluding the 532 young mothers who were already in or were placed in foster care after conception, the data network determined that 24,767 babies were born to first-time teen mothers.
Kathleen Strader is the Healthy Families America’s (HFA) national director of implementation and accreditation. Strader said that there is no real rubric to decide which families receive services.
“We need to be sensitive to the way we approach families,” she said. “We want to take the path of trust-building, because we see it work. It is only through relationships that parents experience positive outcomes.”
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