SAN DIEGO – Children of parents who lost their jobs in the past 3–5 months were more likely to develop psychopathology if they reported three or more moderate to severely stressful life events in the past year than children who reported fewer such events, Dr. Karen L. Weihs reported in an interview during a poster session at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
Dr. Weihs of the department of psychiatry at the University of Arizona, Tucson, said in an interview that she and her colleagues found a higher impairment threshold among children than had been previously reported. “When kids had one or two severe [life] events, they didn't seem to have any higher psychopathology … than kids who had none.
“It was only when they had three severe events that their psychopathology risk went way up,” she said. “That's new, because when you study adults, the general finding has been one severe event greatly elevates the risk of psychopathology. There's some resilience factor that kids seem to have.”
In an effort to test whether stressful life events in the past year predicted the mental health of 9− to 13-year-old children 3–5 months after a parent's job loss, the researchers studied 191 mother-child pairs in one- and two-parent families in nine Maryland counties. Adults had to be unemployed in the prior 8 weeks.
The researchers conducted in-home visits with mothers and their children, where they administered an instrument called the Contextual Assessment of Stressful Events in Childhood, the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), the Columbia Impairment Scale, the Reynolds Child Depression Scale, and the Manifest Anxiety Scale. (The Contextual Assessment is not published but is available free of charge from the university's psychiatry department.)
“This is a stressed sample,” Dr. Weihs said. “The most severe events were in the work category: family finances causing losses of some sort, having to move, having to go without a vacation–serious kinds of things.”
Dr. Wiehs and her associates found that more externalizing and impairment, as measured by the CBCL, could be predicted among those mothers alone, children alone, and mothers and children together who reported three or more moderately to severely stressful life events than among those who reported fewer events.
However, mothers and children who reported three or more moderately to severely stressful life events differed in their reporting of internalizing symptoms. Mothers were more likely than their children to report internalizing symptoms, as measured by the CBCL, while children were more likely than their mothers to report symptoms of depression and anxiety, as measured by the other scales used in the interviews.
One possible explanation Dr. Weihs saw for the discrepancy is the salience of the mothers' reporting.
“A parent might remember something like the kid flunking a major exam or having to do extra schooling in the summer, whereas the kid doesn't want to think about that and might not even tell [the parent] about it,” she said.
She added that one implication of the study is that when you're interviewing children clinically, one should remember that the child might omit some important information from the parent, and vice versa, Dr. Weihs advised.
Information from both the parents and the child can be predictive of how much psychopathology the child is going to have, she said. “It also speaks strongly for making sure we talk to kids and parents, not just one or the other.”