Child Neglect, Social Context, and Educational Outcomes: Examining the Moderating Effects of School and Neighborhood Context

Abstract

Research on child neglect has found that neglected children are more likely to experience worse developmental outcomes than non-neglected children. These negative outcomes include antisocial behavior as well as poor school performance. Eco-developmental theory has found that adverse social contexts often worsen these outcomes for neglected and maltreated youths. However, little research has been done on the educational outcomes of neglected children and none of it has employed a national, longitudinal, community sample with an examination of social context. We do so in our research and find that several types of child neglect significantly predict a variety of poor educational outcomes at the bivariate level and that physical and educational neglect were significantly associated with a composite measure of school problems in multivariate analysis. We offer several explanations for our findings and future directions for research.