Risk Factors

Risk Factors

Risk factors are variables that increase the likelihood that children’s healthy development can be compromised.[3] Studies show that “children with similar biological risk factors may have better or worse outcomes, depending on the nature of the psychosocial environment in which they are reared.”[4] This means that, with the appropriate intervention and support, the disparities caused by biological and health risks can be reduced so that the child can grow to be successful.[5] The opposite is true as well.

Children can be born healthy and have the biological capacity to be highly intelligent and successful. However, early exposure of infants and toddlers to risks ranging from being in a single-parent family, low parent-education level, lack of health care access, poverty, malnutrition, homelessness, abuse, and neglect, can lead to developmental challenges and problems that affect their adulthood. Involvement in the Child Welfare System, including being taken away from primary parent/caregivers, the amount of time spent in foster care, and lack of permanency are also risk factors and contributors to poor developmental outcomes. In the United States, these risk factors and the resulting disparate developmental outcomes disproportionately affect young, low-income, minority children.[6]

Marian Wright Edelman, President of the Children’s Defense Fund®, captures the impact of risk factors on children in these circumstances -

So many poor babies in rich America enter the world with multiple strikes already against them: without prenatal care and at low birth weight; born to a teen, poor, and poorly educated single mother and absent father. At crucial points in their development, from birth through adulthood, more risks and disadvantages cumulate and converge that make a successful transition to productive adulthood significantly less likely and involvement in the criminal justice system significantly more likely.

– Marian Wright Edelman, President of the Children’s Defend Fund®[7]

Knowing the effects of risk factors on early development, CASAs can use this information to better advocate for children’s speedy permanent placement, initiate developmental assessments, get children therapeutic intervention, and link parent/caregivers (biological, foster, or adoptive) to resources and services that help mend the damage caused by these circumstances.

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