The influence of childhood maltreatment on adolescents’ academic performance

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Abstract

Evidence that childhood maltreatment is associated with emotional and behavioral problems throughout childhood suggests that maltreatment could lead to impaired academic performance in middle and high school. This article explores these effects using data on siblings. An index measure of the intensity of childhood maltreatment was included as a covariate in multivariate analyses of adolescents’ risk for school performance impairments. Family fixed effects were used to control for unobservables linked to family background and neighborhood effects. More intense childhood maltreatment was associated with greater probability of having a low grade point average (P=0.001) and problems completing homework assignments (P=0.007). Associations between maltreatment intensity and adolescent school performance were not sensitive to model specification. Additional analyses suggested that maltreatment effects are moderated by cognitive deficits related to attention problems. The implications of these findings for educators and schools are discussed.

Introduction

Childhood maltreatment potentially has major economic implications for U.S. schools and for their students. Even conservative estimates suggest that at least 8% of U.S. children experience sexual abuse before age 18, while 17% experience physical abuse, and 18% experience physical neglect (Flisher et al., 1997, Gorey and Leslie, 1997). Childhood maltreatment, and aversive parenting practices, in general, has the potential to delay the academic progress of students (Shonk & Cicchetti, 2001). It therefore has the potential to undermine schools’ ability to satisfy standards of school progress entailed in the No Child Left Behind legislation (U.S. Department of Education, 2005), putting them at risk for loss of federal funding. It also has the potential to adversely affect students’ economic outcomes in adulthood, via its impact on achievement in middle and high school (Cawley, Heckman, & Vytlacil, 2001; Heckman & Rubinstein, 2001).

Although its potential impact is large, evidence of causal effects of maltreatment on children's longer-term outcomes in school is generally lacking. The current state of evidence for a link between childhood maltreatment (physical and sexual abuse or neglect) and school performance is limited to negative associations between maltreatment and school performance. On average, children who are maltreated receive lower ratings of performance from their school teachers, score lower on cognitive assessments and standardized tests of academic achievement, obtain lower grades, and get suspended from school and retained in grade more frequently (Eckenrode et al., 1993, Erickson et al., 1989, Kendall-Tackett and Eckenrode, 1996, Kurtz et al., 1993, Rowe and Eckenrode, 1999, Shonk and Cicchetti, 2001). Maltreated children are also prone to difficulty in forming new relationships with peers and adults and in adapting to norms of social behavior (Shields et al., 1994, Toth and Cicchetti, 1996). Although these examples of negative associations between maltreatment and school performance are suggestive of causal effects, they could be spuriously driven by unmeasured factors in families or neighborhoods that are themselves correlated with worse academic outcomes among children (Todd & Wolpin, 2003).

In addition, not much of the previous evidence linking childhood maltreatment to worse school performance generalizes well to older children in middle and high school and to children not already identified as needing services. Evidence of the impacts of maltreatment on academic performance in the general population of middle and high school students is needed to establish evidence of effects on schooling attainment in the general education population and on economic outcomes in adulthood.

Using a large data set of U.S. adolescent sibling pairs, this study explores effects of maltreatment—neglect, physical aggression, and sexual abuse—on adolescents’ performance in middle and high school. First, the questions of how childhood maltreatment theoretically could negatively affect later school performance, and of how unobserved family background and neighborhood characteristics might influence ordinary least squares and fixed effects regression estimates of relationships between childhood maltreatment and later school performance, are discussed. Second, empirical estimates from models that controlled for observable and unobservable family and neighborhood characteristics are presented.

Section snippets

Theoretical background

To motivate our empirical analyses, we developed a heuristic model that links childhood maltreatment with later academic performance deficits (Fig. 1). The model is based on the idea, advocated by Shonk and Cicchetti (2001), that childhood maltreatment can influence children's performance of competencies (e.g., engagement in academic tasks) that are necessary for optimal learning and achievement in school. At the top of Fig. 1, family background affects the subsequent incidence of emotional and

Analyses

The empirical analyses were based on estimates from the multivariate cross-sectional regression model:Yij=βXij+δMij+λCij+ωj+eij,where Yij is a measure of scholastic performance for adolescent i residing in family j; X contains measures of family and individual background characteristics; M is a measure of maltreatment severity; Cij is a vector containing measures of acquired scholastic skills; β, δ, and λ are vectors of parameters estimated in the regression; ωj is an family-specific

Sample description

Sample descriptive statistics are shown in Table 1. Table 2 shows the relationship of the maltreatment index with dependent variables used in regression analyses. The maltreatment index was significantly associated with low GPA, problems completing homework assignments, and was marginally associated with being frequently absent from school. There was nonlinear (inverted U-shaped) relationship between maltreatment and problems with teachers and peers.

Regression estimates of school performance impairments

Table 3 shows linear probability model

Discussion

Results from this study indicate that childhood maltreatment may adversely impact adolescents’ performance in school. We found that more intensive forms of childhood maltreatment (before the start of 6th grade) were robustly associated with low GPA and problems completing homework assignments. Non-significant associations were identified for problems with teachers and peers and frequent absence from school. These associations were robust to controls for socioeconomic characteristics and

Conclusion

This study establishes that maltreatment is connected with below average school performance during adolescence, even after controlling for observed and unobserved family and neighborhood effects. The effects of maltreatment should be taken into account in developing schools’ and educators’ responses to poor performance among their students and in guiding the development of service interventions. Maltreatment may negatively affect scholastic performance indirectly through effects on cognitive

Acknowledgments

Funding for this research was received from NIMH under Grants K01-01647 and K24-MH01790, and from the Center for Adolescent Health Promotion and Disease Prevention under a Development Award to Dr. Slade. The authors thank James Rice for able research assistance. They also thank Fred Zimmerman, Thomas McGuire, and John Mullahy for advice and comments on preliminary drafts. This research uses data from Add Health, a program project designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen

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