Lecture 8 Flashcards
(17 cards)
1
Q
What are the three determinants of development?
A
- Genes
- Env
- Past development
- Psychopathology is not something we are born with but is outcome of developmental process
2
Q
What are the areas of work?
A
- Social work and child welfare: identifying best practise and policy related to post-adoption support and stability
- Developmental psychology and psychopathology: mental health and developmental trajectories of adopted children
- Implications of pre-adoption experience and exposure for post adoption development
- Natural experiment to disentangle genes/non-genes on development
3
Q
What are potential issues for adoptees?
A
- Likely to experience cluster of inter-related risk factors that place them on a trajectory of mental health problems that persist across the life course
- Children placed for adoption come from chaotic environments characterised by instability and disorder
- e.g prenatal adversity like substance abuse/poor nutrition, difficult/abusive family env, placement instability, coping with loss of family, friends, possessions
4
Q
What was the Wales Adoption Cohort study?
A
- Children: from younger than 12mo to older than 4yo, 70% placed individually, 30% sibling grouped
- Parents: 84% response from mothers, 14% father, 88% couples, 4% foster carer
- 96 children adopted from local authority care between 2014-2015 with 6y follow up in progress
- 1st questionnaire to adoptive parents, parent interviews, 2nd questionnaire, 3rd questionnaire, upto 5th questionnaire, children invited to neurodevelopment assessment unit
5
Q
What were the pre-adoptive risk?
A
- Child’s age at placement in years
- Number of days spent with birth parents, number of days in care, number of moves/placement, number of ACEs, coded if adopted alone or in sibling group
6
Q
What were the constructs for child mental health and family characteristics?
A
- Child emotional and behavioural problems = Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire
- Child gender, adoptive parents age at adoption, relationship status, education, income, employment, and siblings in household
7
Q
How to disentangle factors related to adopted children’s mental health problems?
A
- Specific effects of risk factors on children’s mental health post-placement are not well understood
- ACEs and number of moves would be associated with a greater risk for enduring emotional and behavioural problems over 4y post-placement, over other risk factors
- SDQ scores remained high over 4y post-placement = more indices of early adversity predicted increases in emotional and behavioural problems over this period
- Effects of early adversity were over and above all other variables
- Children adopted from care are more likely to experience enduring mental health problems that persist in the years following their adoptive placement
- Identification and careful documentation of early adversity is a tool to identify children at risk, and intervention
- Adoption as an intervention improves developmental outcomes of vulnerable children
8
Q
What difference does parenting make?
A
- Warm, sensitive, nurturing, and responsive parenting:
- Mitigates neg effects of early adversity
- Associated with pos outcomes for adoptees
9
Q
Does warm parenting buffer the impact of early adversity on adoptees outcomes? Study
A
- Considering reciprocal influences and adoptees traj of psych/beh problems
- Adoptees may be at greater risk for developmental difficulties but the majority are well-adjusted
- Used a child behaviour checklist looking at emotional and behavioural problems
- Parent to child warmth: 6 items from Iowa Youth and families project
- Adoptees emotional and behavioural problems followed expected trajectories
- Emotional problems decelerated for children exposed to low risk
- Exceptionally warm adoptive parenting associated with a remarkable reduction in emotional and behavioural problem scores
10
Q
What are the neurocognitive profiles of adopted children?
A
- 45 children from 4-8yo were placed for adoption on average at 2 yo
- Examined children’s emotional and behavioural problems at home and school, and profile performance on neurocog tasks - Children performed within the expected range across all neurocog abilities - Many children scored below the expected range for their age, particularly for inhibitory control and non-verbal reasoning
- Children who scored low on non-verbal reasoning were more likely to have behavioural problems
- Children who were adopted later in childhood scored significantly lower in non-verbal reasoning
- Verbal reasoning scores were associated with emotional problems
11
Q
What is emotional recognition in adopted children?
A
- Understanding emotions is fundamental to effective social relationships
- Discrimination accuracy
- Response bias
- Is considered a transdiagnostic factor for psych disorder
- Early experience plays an important role in the development of how children perceive emotion via early adversity and role of the adoptive family
12
Q
What was a study looking at emotion recognition in adopted children?
A
- 42 adopted children and a comparison group of children living with their birth families
- Childrens performance on emotion recognition task
- Children’s histories of adversities and parent and teacher-ratings of emotional and behavioural problems
- Compared to non-adopted children, adopted children had lower discrimination accuracy of sad and angry faces = associated with emotional/behavioural problems
- Early adversity was associated with discrimination accuracy
- High proportion of adopted children appear to have difficulty in some areas of neurocognition
- Adopted children appear to have more difficulty recognising some neg emotions
13
Q
What did the role of parental warmth play? In emotion recognition
A
- Assessed with a 5-min speech sample
- Warm adoptive parenting was associated with fewer behavioural problems and a lower tendency for children to incorrectly identify faces as angry
14
Q
What is the importance of child health and development?
A
- More than a third of parents identified concerns about their child’s development
- Several parents simply recorded developmental delay, and a quarter specifically mentioned concerns about speech and language development
- Physical: children’s mobility and motor development = slowness in walking
- Behavioural: defiant, challenging behaviour with control issues, aggressive, especially upset and overly emotional
- Parents need support and signposting related to their children’s physical and psychological health = it may be hard to distinguish between short-term delays/challenges and longer term needs = follow ups are important
15
Q
How can we support to help strengthen family relationships?
A
- Developing parent-child relationships
- Sibling relationships: think they are unequal tot their other sibling
- Experience and support needs of existing children
16
Q
Why is not always negative?
A
- Parents spoke positively about the growing affection/intimacy between their children
- Parents reported learning to deal with typical ups and downs of sibling dynamics in an effective manner
17
Q
What are key studies looking at adoption and mental health?
A
- Adopted kids have more mental health referrals
- Adoption outcomes worsen with age at placement and number of ACEs
- Warm parenting benefits non-biological families = meta-analysis showing parenting matters in adoption and parenting warmth promotes emotion regulation and social skills
