Child Internalizing Behavior Problems Research Articles

Child exposure to marital conflict and child coping responses as predictors of child adjustment

This study examined the influence of children's exposure to marital conflict and children's coping responses to marital conflict on child adjustment. Forty-three mother–child dyads and 38 of the children's teachers participated in this investigation. Preadolescent children reported the marital conflict they witnessed, their coping responses to marital conflict, and their feelings of depression and global self-worth, while mothers reported their marital conflict and children's internalizing and externalizing behavior problems and teachers reported children's internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to examine the contribution of demographic, marital conflict, and child coping variables to the prediction of child adjustment. The results indicated that aggressive marital conflict was predictive of children's feelings of low self-worth, mother's reports of child externalizing behavior problems, and teacher's reports of child internalizing behavior problems. Moreover, child coping factors contributed unique variances to the prediction of child reports of child depression and teacher reports of child externalizing behavior problems after marital conflict and demographic variables were considered.

Reciprocal Influences among Adrenocortical Activation, Psychosocial Processes, and the Behavioral Adjustment of Clinic-Referred Children

The reciprocal effects among cognitive-behavioral, environmental, and biological influences on clinic-referred children's (N = 64; 34 boys; M age 12.71 years) short-term psychological and psychiatric adjustment were studied. At clinic intake and 6 months later, standardized measures of adjustment and control-related beliefs were assessed. Before and after conflict-oriented parent-child interaction tasks the children's saliva was sampled. Adrenocortical responses (i.e., increases in salivary cortisol) to the social conflict task predicted children's internalizing problem behaviors and anxiety disorders at follow-up. Consistently high adrenocortical reactivity at intake and follow-up was associated with deflated social competence over the 6-month period. Also, specific patterns of discontinuity in children's internalizing behavior problems predicted individual differences in their subsequent adrenocortical responsiveness. Specifically, rising behavior problem levels across time predicted higher and declining behavior problem levels predicted lower adrenocortical reactivity at follow-up. Findings are among the first to suggest links among internalizing behavior problems, adrenocortical responsiveness to social challenge, and clinic-referred children's short-term cognitive-behavioral and emotional adjustment.

Optimism, appraisals, and coping in the adjustment of mothers and their children with spina bifida

Families of children with physical disabilities show substantial differences in the levels of adjustment of both the children and their parents. These differences result, in part, from the complex interplay of family and child adaptation resources, such as coping and social support. In order to identify factors which may differentiate levels of adjustment among families with children with physical disabilities, this study examined relationships among optimism, primary and secondary appraisals of and coping with child-related stressors, maternal psychological adjustment, and child adjustment in 29 families with a child with spina bifida without mental retardation and 28 comparison families with a nondisabled child. For the spina bifida group, primary appraisals were related to the use of avoidant coping strategies, and these coping strategies were related to maternal psychological adjustment and child internalizing behavior problems. No significant differences between the groups in terms of the nature of the relationships or in the levels of the variables were found with the exception that mothers of children with spina bifida were less optimistic than comparison mothers. These data support the importance of coping in understanding the psychological adjustment of mothers faced with a chronic stressor in the family.

Perceptions of mothers' and fathers' responsibility for children's behavior

Mother-blaming has been well documented in research related to the etiology and maintenance of child psychopathology and family dysfunction. However, there has been almost no research that investigates the differential attributions of maternal and paternal blame for different types of problems or attributions of responsibility for prosocial child behaviors. In the current study, young adult participants (primarily Caucasians from the middle class) were asked to rate their perceptions of mothers' and fathers' responsibility for children's internalizing, externalizing, and prosocial behavior. Mothers were rated as more responsible for their children's internalizing behavior problems, and fathers were rated as more responsible for their children's externalizing behavior problems. Perceptions of mothers' and fathers' responsibility for their children's prosocial behaviors did not differ. Ramifications of mother-blaming and father-blaming are discussed.

The analysis of parental ratings of children's behavior using LISREL.

A common procedure for assessing children's behavior is to obtain parental ratings of the child. Since the ratings obtained are a function of both parent and child, disentangling the child's phenotype from that of the rater becomes an important methodological problem. For the analysis of genetic and environmental contributions to children's behavior, solutions to this are available when multiple raters, e.g., two parents, rate multiple children, e.g., twins. This paper describes and illustrates simple LISREL models for the analysis of parental ratings of children's behavior. We show how the assumption that mothers and fathers are rating the same behavior in children can be contrasted with the weaker alternative that parents are rating correlated behaviors. Given the stronger assumption, which appears adequate for ratings of children's internalizing behavior problems, the contribution of rater bias and unreliability may be separated from the shared and nonshared environmental components of variation in a behavior genetic analysis.