Remember the joke about the red-headed stepchild? Well, it turns out it might not be so funny after all. Patricia Schnitzer, a professor at the University of Missouri, recently found that children living with foster parents or step-parents were twice as likely to die from "maltreatment-related unintentional injuries," than were children living only with biological parents. Kids living with completely unrelated adults were even more at risk - Schnitzer found those children were six times as likely to suffer one of those fatal accidents.
What are we talking about here? Well, we're NOT talking about caregivers who maliciously abuse kids. Children in this study died because of accidents that happened when they weren't being adequately supervised, or when their caregivers were too drunk or high to protect them, or when caregivers followed unsafe practices - such as not using carseats, or putting kids in "an unsafe sleep environment" - which I assume means putting infants to sleep on their bellies.
There's definitely a socio-economic subtext to these findings - the children in this study were most often born to poor, unwed drop-outs, many of whom received virtually no pre-natal care. Schnitzer believes that, armed with this information, nurses and other professionals may be better able to target at-risk families and better educate them how to better protect the children in their homes.
