Elsevier

Child Abuse & Neglect

Volume 31, Issue 3, March 2007, Pages 231-253
Child Abuse & Neglect

Individual, family, and neighborhood factors distinguish resilient from non-resilient maltreated children: A cumulative stressors model

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2006.03.011Get rights and content

Abstract

Objective

Children who are physically maltreated are at risk of a range of adverse outcomes in childhood and adulthood, but some children who are maltreated manage to function well despite their history of adversity. Which individual, family, and neighborhood characteristics distinguish resilient from non-resilient maltreated children? Do children's individual strengths promote resilience even when children are exposed to multiple family and neighborhood stressors (cumulative stressors model)?

Methods

Data were from the Environmental Risk Longitudinal Study which describes a nationally representative sample of 1,116 twin pairs and their families. Families were home-visited when the twins were 5 and 7 years old, and teachers provided information about children's behavior at school. Interviewers rated the likelihood that children had been maltreated based on mothers’ reports of harm to the child and child welfare involvement with the family.

Results

Resilient children were those who engaged in normative levels of antisocial behavior despite having been maltreated. Boys (but not girls) who had above-average intelligence and whose parents had relatively few symptoms of antisocial personality were more likely to be resilient versus non-resilient to maltreatment. Children whose parents had substance use problems and who lived in relatively high crime neighborhoods that were low on social cohesion and informal social control were less likely to be resilient versus non-resilient to maltreatment. Consistent with a cumulative stressors model of children's adaptation, individual strengths distinguished resilient from non-resilient children under conditions of low, but not high, family and neighborhood stress.

Conclusion

These findings suggest that for children residing in multi-problem families, personal resources may not be sufficient to promote their adaptive functioning.

Introduction

Child maltreatment includes physical, sexual, or emotional abuse and neglect and constitutes a potent stressor for children. An estimated 906,000 children in the United States were victims of abuse or neglect in 2003 (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2005) and incidence rates of maltreatment have been increasing steadily since the 1980s (Sedlak & Broadhurst, 1996). Children exposed to one form of family violence often experience other forms; neglect is the most common (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2005). A number of well-designed, prospective longitudinal studies have shown that children who are maltreated are at risk of a range of problems in childhood, adolescence and adulthood, including aggression, delinquency, and violent crime, depression, anxiety, and substance use problems, peer problems, and school failure (Cicchetti & Manly, 2001; Horwitz, Widom, McLaughlin, & White, 2001; Lansford et al., 2002; Widom & Maxfield, 2001). Thus, maltreatment is a significant public health concern and efforts should be focused not only on prevention, but on ensuring that children who have been maltreated have the best possible outcomes.

Although children who are maltreated are at risk of problems across multiple domains, not all children who are maltreated experience these difficulties. These resilient children achieve positive developmental outcomes despite the significant adversities they have faced (Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000; Masten & Coatsworth, 1995). Even studies that employ stringent definitions of resilience that require children to manifest competence across multiple domains and over time find that 12–22% of children or adults who were abused as children are functioning well despite their history of maltreatment (e.g., Cicchetti & Rogosch, 1997; Cicchetti, Rogosch, Lynch, & Holt, 1993; Kaufman, Cook, Arny, Jones, & Pittinsky, 1994; McGloin & Widom, 2001). More commonly, however, children who have faced significant adversity function well in some domains, but not others and show fluctuations in functioning over time (Luthar et al., 2000).

Although definitions of resilience vary, a consensus view is emerging that resilient children are those who master normative developmental tasks despite their experiences of significant adversity (Luthar et al., 2000; Masten & Coatsworth, 1998). This definition does not require that youth excel; rather, it requires that youth function at least as well as the average child who has not been exposed to adversity. In middle childhood—the focus of the current investigation—stage-salient tasks include the ability to function well in the school environment, interact appropriately with peers, and regulate behavior (Luthar et al., 2000).

Several prospective, longitudinal studies have attempted to identify factors that promote resilience, or successful adaptation, among children who have been maltreated. Based on some of the early, seminal work on resilience (e.g., Garmezy, 1985; Werner & Smith, 1992), these studies have identified factors at the level of the child, the family, and the child's broader social network that buffer children from the effects of maltreatment. Researchers have found that children who are resilient to maltreatment tend to be characterized by high ego-control and ego-resiliency, high self-esteem and above-average intelligence, and tend to attribute successes to their own efforts (Cicchetti et al., 1993; Feiring, Taska, & Lewis, 2002; Herrenkohl, Herrenkohl, & Egolf, 1994; Moran & Eckenrode, 1992). Having been the victim of maltreatment may influence the likelihood that children possess some of these characteristics. For example, Moran and Eckenrode (1992) showed that individuals who had experienced chronic maltreatment were less likely to possess the personal resources that protected them against depression. More recently, studies have shown that some genotypes and some profiles of physiological stress reactivity confer protection against the adverse effects of maltreatment (Caspi et al., 2002, Foley et al., 2004; Hart, Gunnar, & Cicchetti, 1996; Heim, Newport, Bonsall, Miller, & Nemeroff, 2001; Jaffee et al., 2005). Other studies have shown that females are relatively more resilient to maltreatment than males (McGloin & Widom, 2001), though it is not clear whether the factors that promote resilience to maltreatment differ for boys versus girls.

Children's relationships with family members and other members of their social network have also been found to promote resilience to maltreatment. Maltreated children who reported being relatively more self-reliant within their families and who were able to develop close relationships with other adults scored higher on a composite measure of resilience (Cicchetti & Rogosch, 1997). Positive family changes (e.g., intervention, paternal visitation rights terminated) and, in some instances, removal to foster care have also been associated with improved functioning in isolated domains (Davidson-Arad, Englechin-Segal, & Wozner, 2003; Egeland, Carlson, & Sroufe, 1993; Olivan, 2003). With respect to children's broader social networks, those who experience a structured school environment or who form supportive relationships with teachers or other adults in their communities tend to have better outcomes.

Children who are maltreated tend to grow up in multi-problem families characterized by poverty, exposure to inter-parental violence, parent psychopathology, criminality, drug and alcohol problems, and dangerous neighborhood conditions (Appel & Holden, 1998; Edleson, 1999, Gelles, 1992, Jaffee, 2005; Lynch & Cicchetti, 1998; Sedlak & Broadhurst, 1996). Studies have shown that maltreatment increases children's risk of adverse outcomes independent of these correlated stressors (Cicchetti & Toth, 1995; Widom, 1991). This highlights the need to study children's resilience in context. A transactional approach to the study of resilience would propose that neither children's individual strengths nor the environmental context will predict who is resilient to maltreatment (Sameroff & Chandler, 1975). Rather, the fit between the child and the environment is the best predictor of children's psychological well-being. For example, resilience to maltreatment may depend on the total number of stressors that children face. A cumulative stressors model proposes that under conditions of severe stress, positive functioning may not be possible, even for those children who possess considerable individual strengths (Repetti, Taylor, & Seeman, 2002; Rutter, 1979; Seifer, Sameroff, Baldwin, & Baldwin, 1992). For example, Sameroff, Bartko, Baldwin, Baldwin, and Seifer (1998) showed that personal protective factors appeared to have no effect on children's competence when children were exposed to high numbers of environmental risk factors.

The current study used a person-centered approach to define resilience. Resilient children were those who had (1) been physically maltreated before the age of 5 years and (2) whose antisocial behavior problems as reported by teachers fell within the normal range for similarly-aged (and same-sexed) children. We relied on teachers’ reports of children's antisocial behavior for two reasons. First, our definition of resilience was intended to reflect normative, developmentally appropriate behavior for 5–7-year-olds children. Because teachers, unlike most parents, interact with large numbers of children on a daily basis, they are well-placed to judge whether a given child's behavior is normative in comparison to the behavior of other children. Second, because many of the children were maltreated by their parents, parents’ reports of their children's behavior may have been biased. We focused on children's lack of antisocial behavior problems as a marker for resilience because children who are maltreated are at risk of aggressive and delinquent behaviors (Widom, 1989), and early-emerging antisocial behavior problems predict adverse outcomes across multiple domains, including peer relationships, academic achievement, and physical health (Jaffee, Belsky, Harrington, Caspi, & Moffitt, 2006; Moffitt, Caspi, Harrington, & Milne, 2002).

Although the extant literature has identified multiple characteristics that are associated with resilience to maltreatment, the current study makes two contributions. First, we identify individual, family, and neighborhood characteristics that predict stable, positive adaptation over a 2-year period. Most previous studies have identified factors that promote resilience at a single point in time. Given that many children who are resilient at one point in time are not considered resilient at a later point in time (Jaffee & Gallop, in press; Kaufman et al., 1994), it is important to identify factors that are associated with persistently positive functioning. Second, unlike other studies, we identify the interplay among risk and protective factors. Characteristics at one level of the child's ecology that promote resilience are likely to interact with risk or protective factors at other levels of the child's ecology, but most studies of children's resilience have not tested these interactions. By studying children's functioning in family and neighborhood context, we test whether previously identified “main effects” of protective factors such as IQ or temperament are moderated by the child's broader social context. This approach has the potential to inform intervention efforts by identifying the conditions under which resilience is most likely to be achieved.

The current paper had three goals. First, we developed a definition of resilience that encompassed positive adaptation over time and across informants (i.e., the teacher who reported on the child's behavior when the child was 5 years old was different from the teacher who reported on the child's behavior 2 years later). In order to validate this measure we tested whether children who were defined as resilient according to these criteria were also functioning successfully in other domains.

Second, we tested whether individual, family, and neighborhood characteristics would distinguish resilient from non-resilient maltreated children and tested whether the characteristics that were associated with resilience differed for girls and boys. This model presumes that certain individual, family, or neighborhood characteristics will have “protective-stabilizing” effects on children's functioning (Luthar, 1993, Luthar et al., 2000). That is, children who have the attribute (e.g., high intelligence) and who were maltreated will be behaviorally indistinguishable from children who have the attribute and were not maltreated. It is not known whether the resilience process operates differently for maltreated boys and girls, and we are not aware of theory that would allow us to make a priori hypotheses about sex differences. Nonetheless, to be thorough, we tested for sex differences in the associations examined here.

Third, because very few studies have explored how individual and family or extra-familial factors combine to distinguish resilient from non-resilient children, we tested the hypothesis that children's strengths would predict resilience to maltreatment only when children were exposed to relatively few family and neighborhood stressors. Thus, our analyses made two key comparisons. Comparing resilient to non-resilient children allowed us to test whether individual, family, or neighborhood factors distinguished these two groups. Comparing resilient to non-maltreated children allowed us to test whether maltreated children were doing as well as non-maltreated children simply because both groups were exposed to relatively few family or neighborhood stressors.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants are members of the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study, which investigates how genetic and environmental factors shape children's development. The sampling frame from which the E-Risk families were drawn was two consecutive birth cohorts (1994 and 1995) in a birth register of twins born in England and Wales (Trouton, Spinath, & Plomin, 2002). Of the 15,906 twin pairs born in these 2 years, 71% joined the register.

The E-Risk Study probability sample was drawn using a

Defining resilience

We defined resilience on the basis of children's history of maltreatment and their teachers’ reports of their antisocial behavior. Because boys had significantly higher levels of antisocial behavior than girls, children were compared to other children of their same sex. Children who had never been maltreated were assigned to the non-maltreated group (unweighted n = 1895; weighted proportion = 88%). Children who had been maltreated and whose antisocial behavior scores at ages 5 and 7 fell at or

Discussion

In a group of children who had been maltreated before the age of 5 years, individual, family, and neighborhood characteristics were associated with behavioral resilience. Boys who had above-average intelligence and whose parents had few symptoms of antisocial personality were more likely to be resilient than non-resilient. Similarly, children whose parents were free of substance use problems and who lived in lower-crime neighborhoods characterized by higher levels of social cohesion and

Conclusion

In summary, individual, family, and neighborhood risk factors all distinguished resilient from non-resilient children, but resilience was influenced by the interplay among these different levels of risk and protection. Individual strengths, such as an above-average IQ or an easy-going temperament distinguished resilient from non-resilient maltreated children when children were exposed to relatively few stressors, but not when children were exposed to multiple stressors.

Child maltreatment is a

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the Study mothers and fathers, the twins, and the twins’ teachers for their participation. Our thanks to Michael Rutter and Robert Plomin for their contributions, to Thomas Achenbach for kind permission to adapt the CBCL, to Hallmark Cards for their support, and to members of the E-Risk team for their dedication, hard work, and insights.

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    The E-Risk Study is funded by the Medical Research Council grant number G9806489 and by the UK-Economic and Social Research Council Network for the Study of Social Contexts for Pathways in Crime.

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