Children in households with substance misuse, domestic violence or mental health problems: Who is at risk of entering care?

End of project summary

Main Messages

 Parental problems have previously been associated with children entering care, including mental health problems, substance misuse, learning disabilities, and types of neurodivergence. However, there are many things about the relationship between these issues and children’s care entry that are not known. This project used anonymous routinely collected data to look at the relationship between parental problems and children entering care. It did this by looking at the households of children aged 3 to 17 years who entered care in Wales between 2008 and 2020 and comparing them to other households in the population that had not had a child entering care. The project used data from health services to identify different risk factors in the adults in those households. It looked at whether these factors could predict the likelihood of a child entering care and the circumstances in which they were more likely to have an effect. It found the following important findings:

• Most of the parental risk factors looked at were much more common in the households from which a child entered care, although some risk factors had bigger influences  than others on the probability of a household containing a child that entered care.  In single adult households, most risk factors had a bigger impact on the likelihood of care when they occurred in households headed by a woman rather than households headed by a man. However, anxiety had a bigger impact in households headed by a man.
• Children from households in areas of high deprivation are more likely to enter care than those in areas of low deprivation, however the risk factors seem to have the same impact on the odds of care when they occur in areas of high and low deprivation.
• The impact that parental risk factors have on a child entering care, vary by the child’s age and ethnicity. In similar households (with same parental problems), then children from ethnic minorities are likely to enter care than white children. The increases in children entering care between 2008 and 2020 appear to be at least partly associated with increases in parental depression.