Two-hundred seventy-one elementary age high-IQ children and their parents completed an extensive battery of questions on social and emotional development. Eighty-eight children (37%) conceptualized themselves as differing from their peers. Although they described differences in a positive fashion, and although their self-esteem was above the mean reported for a large normative sample, it was lower than that of high-IQ children who did not think of themselves as being different. Furthermore, the reports about peer relations given by children who thought themselves different contained more signs suggesting difficulties than did those of children who did not. These results suggest that many cognitively gifted children need increased psychological support if they are to optimize their personal and social development.
We examined the role of a history of sexual abuse as a predictor of child maltreatment by adolescent mothers in a prospective study of 104 mother-child dyads. Mothers were interviewed about any experienced abuse, and the mother-child dyads were observed in a teaching interaction and in the Strange Situation when the children were 1 year old. Three and a half years later, the mothers were interviewed about their Child Protective Service (CPS) contacts since the birth of their children. The percentage of mothers reporting CPS contacts for their own children was 15.4%, 38.5%, and 83.3%, respectively, for those mothers with no history of sexual abuse, a history of a single incident or brief duration of sexual abuse, and those mothers with a history of chronic sexual abuse (median 24 months duration; test of increasing trend significant atp< .000009). Mothers who reported having been chronically sexually abused as children were significantly more likely to have CPS contacts for their own children, after controlling for history of physical abuse, quality of early teaching interactions, and infant attachment security (both of which also predicted CPS contacts), race, IQ, welfare status at 1 year postpartum, and history of foster care.
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