Children’s Pathways of Exposure to Child Protective Services Over the Life Course and by Race/Ethnicity

Existing research has highlighted the prevalence, racial/ethnic disproportionality, and effects of Child Protective Services (CPS) contact among children and their parents. However, less is known about the distribution of processes through which children become exposed to CPS. In this paper, we examine how pathways into CPS contact change over the course of childhood, as well as how these pathways vary by child race/ethnicity. We use national administrative data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System to calculate report rates for each child age and racial/ethnic group by CPS report source. We find that the source of reports shifts over the course of childhood, in line with the different institutional contacts children have as they age. Additionally, racial/ethnic differences in report rates are largest when children are under the age of one and reduce as children age. Across all report sources, report rates for Black children are higher than rates for children in other racial/ethnic groups, although the extent of this inequality varies by report source. Findings suggest that attending to variation in institutional contact over the life course and across groups can illuminate the distribution of CPS system exposure across children and families.