Early childhood maltreatment and profiles of resilience among child welfare-involved children

Abstract

Given the high burden of child maltreatment, there is an urgent need to know more about resilient functioning among those who have experienced maltreatment. The aims of the study were to: 1) identify distinct profiles of resilience across cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and social domains in young children involved in the child welfare system; and 2) examine maltreatment characteristics and family protective factors in relation to the identified resilience profiles. A secondary analysis was conducted using data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW-II). Latent profile analysis was performed on a sample of 827 children aged 3–5 years (46% girls, Mean age = 3.96). Three distinct resilience profiles were identified: 1) low cognitive resilience (24%); 2) low emotional and behavioral resilience (20%); and 3) multidomain resilience (56%). Caregiver cognitive stimulation, no out-of-home placement, higher caregiver education level, older child age, and being a girl were associated with the multidomain resilience profile. The findings provide empirical support for the multifaceted nature of resilience and suggest that practitioners need to help children achieve optimal and balanced development by assessing, identifying, and targeting those domains in which children struggle to obtain competence.

Resilience trajectories and links with childhood maltreatment in adolescence: a latent growth modeling approach

“…In addition, the results of the current study revealed that adolescents who live in families experiencing financial difficulties and whose only one parent has a college or university education or adolescents that do not know about their parents' education were more likely to have stable lower resilience. These results support prior findings [20,21]. Previous studies also found that child maltreatment is highly associated with lower levels of parental education and financial difficulties in families [39].…”

“…In a general sample of Lithuanian adolescents, two groups of stable lower and stable higher resilience have been identified within 8.6% and 91.4% of participants, respectively. The group of stable higher resilience is quite large compared to previous findings that reported around 20-57% of resilient adolescents [18,[20][21][22]. However, most previous studies included only adolescents exposed to maltreatment or other adverse experiences.…”

“…The proportions of adolescents who had experienced peer or adult sexual abuse did not differ between lower and higher resilience groups. However, Yoon et al [20] did not find differences between exposure to different types of maltreatment and resilience. However, younger children (3-5 years) involved with the child welfare system participated in the aforementioned study.…”

“…Also, studies showed that maltreatment experiences in childhood play an important role in the development of resilience [19]. In high-risk maltreated child groups, 20-57% of participants were identified as resilient [18,[20][21][22]. Nevertheless, not many studies have explored different types of maltreatment in the context of resilience.…”

Trajectories of resilience among young children involved with child protective services

“…In contrast, other studies have classified resilience as a multidimensional construct and therefore measured multiple developmental domains (Dubowitz et al, 2016;Kinard, 1998;Sattler & Font, 2018;Yoon et al, 2022). For example, in a study of 2-6year-old children who experienced maltreatment, resilience was defined as a child performing adequately (i.e., better than 1 SD below the mean) for all 3 domains of resilience (behavioral, social, and developmental).…”