The Caregiver–Child Relationship, Youth Mental Health, and Placement Stability in a Child Welfare Sample

Objective: Healthy relationships between adolescents and their caregivers have been robustly associated with better youth outcomes in a variety of domains. Youth in contact with the child welfare system are at higher risk for worse outcomes including mental health problems and home placement instability. A growing body of literature points to youth mental health problems as both a predictor and a consequence of home placement instability in this population; the present study aimed to expand our understanding of these phenomena by examining the interplay among the caregiver-child relationship, youth mental health symptoms, and placement change over time. Method: The sample consisted of 1,179 youths aged 11-16, from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being, a nationally representative sample of children in contact with the child welfare system. We used bivariate correlations and autoregressive cross-lagged path analysis to examine how youths’ reports of their externalizing and internalizing symptoms, their relationship with their caregivers, and placement changes reciprocally influenced one another over three time points. Results: In the overall models, early internalizing symptoms significantly negatively predicted the quality of the caregiver-child relationship at the next time point, and early externalizing symptoms predicted subsequent placement change. In addition, later externalizing symptoms negatively predicted subsequent reports of relationship quality, and later placement changes predicted subsequent externalizing problems; these relationships were significant only at the trend level (p \u3c .10). The quality of the relationship was significantly negatively correlated with externalizing and internalizing problems at all time points, and all variables demonstrated autoregressive stability over time. Conclusions: Our findings support the importance of comprehensive interventions for youth in contact with the child welfare system, which target not only youth symptoms in isolation, but also the caregiver-child relationship, as a way to improve social-emotional outcomes in this high-risk population

Unlocking the Black Box: A Multilevel Analysis of Preadolescent Children’s Coping

This random assignment experimental study examined the intersection of children’s coping and physiologic stress reactivity and recovery patterns in a sample of preadolescent boys and girls. A sample of 82 fourth-grade and fifth-grade (Mage = 10.59 years old) child–parent dyads participated in the present study. Children participated in the Trier Social Stress Test and were randomly assigned to one of two post–Trier Social Stress Test experimental coping conditions—behavioral distraction or cognitive avoidance. Children’s characteristic ways of coping were examined as moderators of the effect of experimental coping condition on cortisol reactivity and recovery patterns. Multilevel modeling analyses indicated that children’s characteristic coping and experimental coping condition interacted to predict differential cortisol recovery patterns. Children who characteristically engaged in primary control engagement coping strategies were able to more quickly down-regulate salivary cortisol when primed to distract themselves than when primed to avoid, and vice versa. The opposite pattern was true for characteristic disengagement coping in the context of coping condition, suggesting that regulatory fit between children’s characteristic ways of coping and cues from their coping environment may lead to more and less adaptive physiologic recovery profiles. This study provides some of the first evidence that coping “gets under the skin” and that children’s characteristic ways of coping may constrain or enhance a child’s ability to make use of environmental coping resources