Life events: children's reports

Abstract

Children 7 to 12 years of age were asked to indicate events they had experienced in the previous three months in a questionnaire devised for the study. Most children were able to complete the questionnaire and reported positive and negative events, the most common themes being personal achievement, illness-related events and problems in relationships. The agreement between parents and child reporting of individual events was uneven and children reported more events than parents. Psychiatrically disturbed children noted an excess of negative and loss events and children attending paediatric clinics reported fewer events, particularly fewer positive happenings, than non-attending primary school children. A child Life Events questionnaire may be of use to explore disturbed and ill children's perception of their lives.

The Consequences of Parental Underestimation and Overestimation of Youth Exposure to Violence

“…First, relatively minor events that parents trivialize or forget may be especially impactful to children (Kuo et al, 2000). Second, children sometimes “telescope” past events; that is, that they remember an event as being more recent than it actually was (Bailey & Garralda, 1990). Third, parental awareness of a child's experiences outside of the home depends, at least partially, on whether the child informs his or her parents about such events (Kerr & Stattin, 2000; Lahey, Van Hulle, D’Onofrio, Rodgers, & Waldman, 2008; Stattin & Kerr, 2000).…”

“…These reporting discrepancies raise several issues. The first is which reporter is most accurate (Bailey & Garralda, 1990). A second issue is whether the parent or the child reports more strongly predict child outcomes (Byrnes et al, 2007; Duncan, Duncan, & Strycker, 2002).…”

Epidemiological approaches to measure childhood stress

“…Moreover, children might judge the perceived stressfulness of events differently than their parents do. 63,[84][85][86] Child and parent interview to determine the six most significant life events of the past year, resulting in a global stress score…”

“…Parent reporting of events is now considered as less reliable than self‐reports by children, since parents may only have a limited awareness of what happens to their children and what kind of daily hassles they have to overcome. Moreover, children might judge the perceived stressfulness of events differently than their parents do 63,84–86 …”

Parental and children's report of emotional problems: agreement, explanatory factors and event‐emotion correlation

“…Still, some methodological challenges exist. First of all, opposite trends in parent‐child agreement were seen between clinical and nonclinical populations (Bailey & Garralda, ; Johnston, Steele, Herrera, & Phipps, ; Martin et al., ) while research has been mainly focused on clinical populations. In a clinical setting, parental overestimation of a child's emotional status could be expected due to a discrepancy in treatment perspectives: parents often have the perspective that the child's behaviour warrants treatment and as such they will recall the psychopathological behaviour of their child that confirms this perspective (De Los Reyes & Kazdin, ).…”