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Universal Access to Parenting Support Lowers Child Foster Placements
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The Triple P System Population Trial showed that if parents have easy access to proven parenting support throughout a community, the number of child foster-care placements and child-abuse injuries actually goes down.
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Parents could get as much or as little support from practical, proven tools that they could apply to their own families—to solve challenges associated with everyday situations like getting ready for school, mealtime and bedtime, doing chores, addressing tantrums, and more.
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The child-maltreatment prevention study, sponsored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and conducted at the University of South Carolina, was carefully conducted:
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18 counties (each 50 to 175 thousand population) randomly assigned to either the Triple P system or control
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Independent data collected from three sources (foster care, hospital, and social-services systems)
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Took into account trends over time
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Documented cost of implementation
The Triple P system counties showed substantial drops in out-of-home placement of children into foster care and in medical injuries for child maltreatment requiring hospital treatment, and a significant slowing down in the increase of substantiated child maltreatment cases. The full study is reported in the March 2009 issue of Prevention Science [click here to access the published article of the population trial].
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What is Triple P? The Triple P—Positive Parenting Program is a multi-level system of parenting support backed by a large body of published studies showing consistent effectiveness, summarized at this link. Triple P is not a single parenting effort; it is a whole suite or collection of “programs” or strategies that a parent can choose from, and Triple P is for EVERY parent rather just a few or only for some high-risk areas.
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Triple P Prevention Estimator, found below, can estimate potential cost savings from implementation of the Triple P system as it was done in the aforementioned study. Let’s walk through an example. Select a state—let’s choose Florida. The number of children birth to age 9 in Florida is 1,977,541 (right panel). Choose the Out of Home Placements tab, and then set the slider on the annual cost of a placement in Florida—let’s choose $18,000. The Estimator determined that if the effects from the Triple P System Population Trial took place in Florida, this would result in an annual savings of $47,832,390 from fewer placements alone. To apply a cautious interpretation, suppose the effects in Florida were only half of those found in the study, then the savings would be cut in half, or $23,916,195. So a conservative estimate of the child out-of-home placements per year would be $23 to $47 million annually if Triple P were applied statewide in Florida.
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Useful Links
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