The psychological adjustment of a sample of New York City preschool children 8–10 months after September 11, 2001.

Abstract

This investigation compared the adjustment of two groups of New York City preschool children 8–10months after September 11, 2001. One group was within 1 mile (1.61 km) of the World Trade Center andexposed to one or more traumatic events. The second group was 2 to 14 miles (3.28–22.54km) away andnot exposed to traumatic events. Parents evaluated their children by marking a DSM–IV based PTSDquestionnaire and a standardized norm-referenced index of childhood adjustment. Parents also rated theirpersonal adjustment by completing self-report measures of PTSD, anxiety, and depression. None of thetrauma-exposed children warranted a current, probable PTSD diagnosis. Moreover, scores on thenorm-referenced measure of childhood adjustment did not significantly vary between groups. Theseoutcomes were consistent after adjusting for the potentially confounding influence of parental PTSD,anxiety, and depression symptoms. The findings suggest that the traumatized children in this sample wererelatively resilient to the events of September 11, 2001 at the diagnostic level and on a norm-referencedindex of childhood psychopathology. The outcomes may also suggest that the DSM–IV PTSD avoidance-symptom diagnostic threshold may have been too high to reflect morbidity at the diagnostic level for thissample.Keywords: PTSD, diagnosis, epidemiology