Laid Off Dads, Laid Off Moms, and Child Abuse

http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/laid-off-dads-laid-off-moms-and-child-abuse/

July 23, 2013
Bill Gardner

What happens to children when their parents lose their jobs? My intuition is that job losses stress families and put children at increased risk of child abuse. But Jason Lindo, Jessamyn Schaller, and Benjamin Hansen have surprising data saying that the answer is more interesting than that.

Previous data suggested that my intuition was wrong and that hard economic times have little influence on child abuse.

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The authors took a fresh look at the issue of unemployment and child abuse using California county data from 1996 to 2009.

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The pink bar on the left represents a 0.68% increase in child abuse associated with layoffs of all workers. This increase was so small that it was not statistically different from zero. The blue and green bars, however, are the effects of layoffs of female and male workers respectively. They show that

a 0.1% increase in the fraction of working-age males being laid off leads to a 3.09% increase in the number of reports of abuse. In contrast, the point estimates imply that 0.1% increase in the fraction of working-age females being laid off leads to a 3.27% reduction in the number of reports of abuse.

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So layoffs have large and opposite effects on child abuse, depending on whether men or women are laid off.

Lindo and colleagues have a plausible explanation for this. Female layoffs increase the proportion of time children are with mom. Male layoffs increase the proportion they are with dad. Both genders abuse children, but a man is about three times more likely to abuse on a per hour basis than a woman.

So much for my intuitions: I thought the story was about stress, but it is also about time and gender. This study tells us to look at how the effect of a treatment or a risk factor varies depending on the person it is applied to. This is why research study populations should be as diverse as is practicable. When it makes sense, we should include both adults and children, or men and women, and carry out the analyses that look for heterogeneity of effects. This is the motivation behind personalized medicine: finding out what works for whom.

The policy upshot of some previous research on unemployment and child abuse was that although reducing unemployment is a very good thing, it probably won’t do much to reduce child abuse. This study doesn’t change that conclusion. But it does suggest that we need to do a better job of socializing men to be authoritative, effective, and non-abusive parents.

[Note: Authoritative, rather than authoritarian.
Authoritative parenting has been found to have better outcomes for the child than either authoritarian or permissive child-rearing.]