Longitudinal Relationships Between Foster Children’s Mental Health Problems and Parental Stress in Foster Mothers and Fathers

Abstract

Abstract. This paper focuses on the longitudinal relationships between foster children’s mental health problems and parental stress across a 1-year interval with three measurements. A sample of 94 foster children and a comparison group of 157 biological children and their families participated in this study. The age of the children was between 2 and 7 years. At the initial assessment, the foster children had been in their foster families since 2–24 months. Based on Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) scores, the results indicated increased internalizing and externalizing mental health problems in the foster children group. Both mental health scores remained rather stable across the longitudinal assessments in foster as well as in biological children. Internalizing as well as externalizing scores were substantially correlated with parental stress in both samples. Moreover, changes in mental health scores were associated with changes in parental stress. However, cross-lagged panel analyses showed no clear pattern of temporal relationships between children’s mental health scores and parental stress. Implications as well as strengths and limitations of the current study are addressed in the Discussion section.

Foster Parent Stress as Key Factor Relating to Foster Children’s Mental Health: A 1-Year Prospective Longitudinal Study

“…Nonetheless, our study suggests that foster parent stress and foster children's mental health are correlated, which is in line with previous research (e.g., Kelley et al 2011;McSherry et al 2018;Murray et al 2011). However, only a few longitudinal studies have examined the directionality of the effects (Gabler et al 2018;Goemans et al 2018a;Lohaus et al 2018). These studies found significant weak to moderate correlations between stress of parents at the first time point and mental health of foster children at a later time point.…”

“…These studies found significant weak to moderate correlations between stress of parents at the first time point and mental health of foster children at a later time point. Two of these studies (Goemans et al 2018a;Lohaus et al 2018) tested this relation in a multivariate model using structural equation modeling, and found no significant prospective pathways from foster parent stress to foster children's behavior problems, meaning that foster parent stress did not predict foster children's mental health. As Lohaus et al (2018) suggested, identifying prospective pathways might be difficult if most variance of later assessments is already explained by the previous assessments, which is shown by the high stability across assessments.…”

A Systematic Review on Foster Parents’ Psychological Adjustment and Parenting Style—An Evaluation of Foster Parents and Foster Children Variables

“…The included studies were conducted between 2011 and 2020 and comprised a total of N = 1794 non-relative foster parents, whose ages ranged between 30 and 67 years; n = 2 studies did not report foster parents' age [55,56]. Of all the included studies, n = 9 included foster mothers [57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65] while n = 5 [66][67][68][69][70] showed a more homogeneous gender distribution among foster parents; n = 2 studies [55,56] did not report information on foster parents' gender distribution. As shown in Table 1, foster parents were mostly married, albeit n = 6 studies [55,56,62,64,68,69] did not report information on foster parents' marital status.…”

“…Of all the included studies, n = 9 included foster mothers [57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65] while n = 5 [66][67][68][69][70] showed a more homogeneous gender distribution among foster parents; n = 2 studies [55,56] did not report information on foster parents' gender distribution. As shown in Table 1, foster parents were mostly married, albeit n = 6 studies [55,56,62,64,68,69] did not report information on foster parents' marital status. Only two studies [66,67] provided information on foster couples' sexual orientation.…”

Assessing Mothers’ Parenting Stress: Differences Between One- and Two-Child Families in China

“…Abidin put forward a parenting stress model, pointing out that parenting stress leads to negative parenting behaviors, such as strict discipline and punishment, which exacerbates behavioral problems in children ( Abidin, 1990 ; Neece et al, 2012 ; Crum and Moreland, 2017 ; Lohaus et al, 2018 ). Abidin (1990) states that parenting stress is caused by both parental characteristics and situational factors.…”