Families with young children in homeless shelters: Developmental contexts of multisystem risks and resources

Abstract

We apply a multisystem perspective to three aims relevant to resilience for young children in emergency and transitional homeless shelters. We consider profiles of risks and resources before shelter, early childhood program enrollment during shelter, and the likelihood of returning to shelter or having a subsequent child welfare placement. We used longitudinal, city-wide data from multiple sources integrated at the individual level across the lifespan for 8 birth cohorts. Young children (N = 1,281) stayed in family shelters during an 18-month period during a multisystem intervention. Risk factor rates were high as were rates of early childhood program enrollment (66.1% in any program; 42.3% in a high-quality program), which may suggest positive effects of the multisystem intervention. Multilevel latent class analysis revealed four profiles, considering prior shelter stays, prior child welfare placements, prior elevated lead levels, perinatal factors (teenage mother, prenatal care, low maternal education, and poor birth outcomes), demographics, and early childhood program enrollment and quality. One profile with higher rates of child welfare placement before the shelter stay and considerable enrollment in high-quality early childhood programs corresponded to lower rates of subsequent child welfare placement. Profiles did not differ on the likelihood of returning to shelter.

Emergence and evolution of developmental resilience science over half a century

“…Nonetheless, collecting empirical data suitable for these methods can be daunting. Additional signs of progress can be found in papers applying network analysis to capture patterns of coordinated resilience resources or processes (e.g., Höltge et al, 2021;Ungar et al, 2023) or linked patterns of stressors, symptoms, and resilience factors (e.g., Kalisch et al, 2019); multilevel latent class analysis to identify profiles of linked risks, assets, services, and/or adaptive behavior (e.g., Cutuli et al, 2023) or multiple trajectory models (e.g., Wiglesworth et al, 2023). Nevertheless, multisystem theory about resilience remains substantially ahead of the empirical evidence to date on the patterns and processes of integrated multisystem resilience.…”