The high level of activity in child protection services and children’s social care across the UK is poorly understood. Recently, concern has been growing about the number of infants and small children being separated from parents and siblings because of child protection concerns and the potentially adverse consequences of such early intervention. The repeated removal of newborn infants from vulnerable mothers has drawn particular criticism and calls for change in social work practice (2, 3, 14).
In England, the Department for Education (DfE) is responsible for overseeing the effective and safe delivery of children’s services by local authorities. A review of the DfE by the National Audit Office in 2019 concluded “while the Department has put in place a programme of reform, it still does not fully understand what is driving demand for children’s social care or why there is such wide variation between local authorities in their children’s social care activity and costs” (6)
In 2021, the independent review of children’s social care was announced by the UK government with the aim of improving the children’s social care system in England. The preliminary report of the independent review in June 2021 cited rises in parental addiction, mental illness, disability, domestic abuse, unaccompanied asylum-seeking and criminal exploitation as explaining in part why more families are becoming involved in children’s social care, and finds a contributory causal relationship between family income, maltreatment and the need for care.
The report also notes heavy caseloads for social workers, remote “risk-averse” decision-making and inter-generational effects. A large proportion of mothers who have had more than one infant accommodated have themselves experienced social care in childhood. Regarding the effect of poverty, MacAlister states “we have now reached a point where the weight of evidence showing a contributory causal relationship between income, maltreatment and state intervention in family life is strong enough to warrant widespread acceptance.” Any role of family instability in the requirement for care or as a driver of rising demand is not explored. The remainder of the increase in activity was explained by changes in professional responses to children in need (MacAlister, 2021).
Previous research had established that aggregations of socio-economic risk factors are strongly associated with children entering care. Children living with single mothers of low educational attainment and receiving benefits had a risk of entering care before the age of 7 years of approximately one in seven in a national cohort study of Swedish children (Franzen, 2007). Previously, a child in England of mixed ethnicity in a single parent family receiving benefits for low income was found to have a risk of entering care of approximately one in ten (Bebbington and Miles, 1989). In both studies, living in a single parent family was the largest independent risk factor for children entering care (1, 9).
In the UK, absolute poverty in childhood decreased in the years prior to 1979 before levelling off. Relative child poverty (children living in households with income below two thirds of median income) increased markedly in the UK between 1979 and 1996, partly due to a rise in lone parent households. Lone parent households have the least wealth and the lowest incomes of any household type (8, 13, 16, 17).
Trans-generational effects of socio-economic disadvantages have already been proposed in research cited by MacAlister. Using a family stress model, these are said to “operate as acute or chronic factors on the risk of child abuse and neglect, including their impact on the parents’ own childhoods.” Poverty alone is neither a necessary or sufficient causal factor in the occurrence of child abuse or neglect (Bywaters, Bunting, et al., 2016). It follows that trans-generational effects of poverty, family structure, family breakdown and parental drug and alcohol misuse could underlie the aggregation of multiple risk factors in affected families and help explain perplexing trends in the need for social care.
Most established risk factors for children entering care had stabilised in Scotland in the early part of this century. Absolute and relative child poverty was reducing, the rate of births to women under the age of 25 continued a long term decline and the prevalence of alcohol and drug misuse in young adults was stable or improving (15, 16, 19, 20, 21). In contrast, the number of children in local authority care (becoming looked after outwith the parental home), having fallen through the 1980s and 1990s, had been steadily rising since 1998, with an associated increase in the number of child protection referrals and court orders for child protection (18, 19).
The children being accommodated by Scottish local authorities included a steadily increasing number of infants and young children subject to court orders or entering care because they were considered to be at significant risk of physical and emotional abuse or neglect, often in the context of parental addiction. The number of infants (less than 12 months old) starting to be looked after annually increased from 268 to 753 between 2003 and 2012. The number of children leaving care each year, either returning home or moving into permanent placements, also increased (19).
By 2013, 1.8% of Scottish children were looked after by local authorities or on child protection registers. The total number of children accommodated away from the parental home by Scottish local authorities measured at a single point each year had doubled from 5,349 to 11,282 since 1998 (figure 2).
Noting the marked rise in the number of children entering care in Scotland between 1998 and 2013, the Chief Medical Officer reported that material deprivation was “likely to be a major upstream determinant in the need for care” (20). It was elsewhere speculated that these trends could be explained by an increased awareness of child abuse or changes in practice by professionals in response to high profile child protection failings. Potential drivers of need were not explored in the annual Scottish Government report of Children’s Social Work Statistics, and no reference made to changing family structures, recent or historical (19).
In most cultures, parental marriage is considered advantageous for children but the underlying reasons for the apparent benefits are disputed. The association of parental marriage with positive outcomes for children is substantially explained by selection factors such as the parents’ income and educational attainment (5, 6, 11). When many potential confounders were controlled for in a study of children of the UK millennium cohort, small but significant advantages remained in the social and cognitive development of children born to married couples compared with children born to unmarried cohabiting couples (Crawford, Goodman and Greaves, IFS 2013). No substantial research has examined the effects of parental marriage across generations.
In Scotland, the number of births to unmarried parents in 1977 was 5,968 (9.6% of all births). In subsequent years there was a marked increase in the number and proportion of births to unmarried parents. This trend continued until 2008 when births outside marriage reached 30,055 (50.3%). The number of sole registrations declined during the study period. Joint registrations with parents living at different addresses increased slightly. Most registrations for births to unmarried parents involved cohabiting couples (figure 3).
The peak maternal age at first birth in areas of multiple deprivation in Scotland was twenty years in 2013 (24). A twenty-one year interval between the rising trends of births outside marriage and young children entering care suggests an association of the need for local authority care with material poverty and the marital status of their grandparents when their parents were born. This apparent trans-generational protective effect of parental marriage at population level could be produced by multiple mechanisms.
Compared with children born to married parents, children born to unmarried cohabiting parents experience higher rates of parental separation in childhood. Parental separation, as an adverse childhood experience, can cause damaging psychological stress, increasing the risk of mental illness and addiction. These factors in turn can adversely affect relationship stability and parenting capacity in adults.
The children of single parents have a substantially increased risk of material poverty, low educational attainment, risk-taking behaviours in adolescence and poor quality adult relationships (5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 16). Parental separation, poverty and substance misuse are likely mediators between the grandparents’ marital status when the parents were born and the need for social care in grandchildren.
It is reported to be protective for children to have a cohesive family support network. Having married grandparents may be of particular benefit to the children of single parents; either directly, through economic support and child care; or indirectly through the parent having grown up in a stable family unit. Married relationships may also in some way promote the development of healthy behaviours or skills which equip children to become competent parents for the next generation (5, 10, 20).
In addition there could be an effect of inequitable practice among health professionals, police, social work or courts based on a perceived respectability of married families and assumed protective factors.
The absolute risk for children entering care may be determined by national and local policy, practice and capacity among different agencies well as prevalent socio-economic conditions and levels of maltreatment. Assuming no substantial deviation from national patterns in the local authority which provided the sample data, the absolute risk of entering care under the age of five years for Scottish children with unmarried parents and maternal grandparents may have been greater than 4% during the period studied.
