Cumulative Rates of Child Protection Involvement and Terminations of Parental Rights in a California Birth Cohort, 1999–2017
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives. To document the cumulative childhood risk of different levels of involvement with the child protection system (CPS), including terminations of parental rights (TPRs). Methods. We linked vital records for California’s 1999 birth cohort (n = 519 248) to CPS records from 1999 to 2017. We used sociodemographic information captured at birth to estimate differences in the cumulative percentage of children investigated, substantiated, placed in foster care, and with a TPR. Results. Overall, 26.3% of children were investigated for maltreatment, 10.5% were substantiated, 4.3% were placed in foster care, and 1.1% experienced a TPR. Roughly 1 in 2 Black and Native American children were investigated during childhood. Children receiving public insurance experienced CPS involvement at more than twice the rate of children with private insurance. Conclusions. Findings provide a lower-bound estimate of CPS involvement and extend previous research by documenting demographic differences, including in TPRs. Public Health Implications. Conservatively, CPS investigates more than a quarter of children born in California for abuse or neglect. These data reinforce policy questions about the current scope and reach of our modern CPS.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".