Life stress and maladaptation of children

Abstract

Social environmental variables differentiating maladapting children from matched controls in four inner-city elementary schools were investigated. Teacher selection was used to identify the maladapting children. Identified maladapting children were more likely to have been on welfare and to have experienced significantly more stressful life events during the previous year than the matched control children. The maladapting group was subdivided into welfare and nonwelfare groups. Comparisons between groups on the life stress event measures indicated that the nonwelfare maladapting group experienced more life events than either the nonwelfare controls or the maladapting welfare children. The measures of life events correlated with parent ratings of behavior problems for the nonwelfare maladapting group but not for the welfare maladapting or the con trol groups. One can conceptualize two general categories of foci for preventive interventions: people at risk and environments that are risk producing. Identification of high risk individuals often involves selecting those who are manifesting some minor adjustment difficulty. The expectation is that intervention at this early point will Prevent more serious disorders later. Selection of an environmental focus is often based on some theoretical formulation and/or epidemiological research indicating a relationship between the environmental variable and disorder. The expectation here is that by effecting a change in the environmental factor the causal chain will be broken and disorder will be less likely to occur. The present paper attempts to form a bridge between these approaches. The argument is 1 The study was part of a program evaluation of the Child Development Program of the Phoenix South Community Mental Health Center. Funds to support the evaluation were provided by NIMH part F grant #09-H-000522-03-0. The cooperation of Dr. Marguerite Dickey, the staff of the Child Development Program, and Mr. David Balk is gratefully acknowledged.