Mental Health Symptoms In Early Childhood: Within- and Between-Person Effects of Risk and Resilience Factors

• In Event: Multisystem Resilience Factors: Promoting and Protecting Children’s Mental Health in Multiple Risk and Cultural Contexts

Abstract

A child’s mental health relies on a network of interacting systems within and outside of the developing child. Positive and negative influences accumulate and interact to shape lifelong trajectories of mental health symptoms (Ungar & Theron, 2020). Yet most research has concentrated on the effects of cumulative risks with little attention to the cumulative effect of multisystem positive influences that nurture children’s mental health. Research that examines positive influences generally is limited to evaluating the role of a single positive factor or cumulative child characteristics. Additionally, It is important to understand how both cumulative risk and multisystem positive influences impact early childhood mental health symptoms because early childhood is a period of rapid development that is sensitive to external influences (Shonkoff et al., 2017). This means early childhood is a period of heightened vulnerability, but also a window of opportunity for positive experiences to promote long-term mental health. The current study evaluated how positive influences, socioeconomic status, and negative life events shape early childhood mental health symptoms.
Data were drawn from the Family Life Project (Vernon-Feagans & Cox, 2013), a longitudinal study of 1,292 children from rural, high-poverty regions in the United States. Children were assessed from 6 months to 90 months old. We measured children’s Socioeconomic Status (SES), through a composite of family income, years of education, and job prestige. Primary caregivers reported on the family’s negative life events in the 6 months prior to each visit, and on children’s mental health symptoms via the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (Goodman et al., 2000). Resilience factors were selected based on widely documented adaptive systems (Masten et al., 2021). We included measures within the child (e.g., self-regulation, persistence, and social skills), family (e.g., parenting, parental wellbeing), and larger community (e.g., local community, and social support). We estimated children’s (weighted) accumulation of resilience factors via a principal component analysis, which indicated two orthogonal components capturing child- and parent-based sources of resilience. Next, we fitted a series of cross-lagged autoregressive latent trajectory models with structured residuals to simultaneously estimate: systematic growth in children’s negative life events and mental health symptoms, lagged and contemporaneous within-child relations between negative life events and child mental health symptoms, and if child and parent sources of resilience in early life moderate these relations.
Consistent with hypotheses, results generally supported our between-person hypotheses (Figure 1; Figure 2). Higher SES and more parent and child-based sources of resilience were associated with lower mental health symptoms. Additionally, child resilience factors had a stronger association with fewer internalizing symptoms for lower SES children. Further, only parent-based resilience factors were associated with more negative growth in internalizing symptoms. Inconsistent with hypotheses, there were no effects of SES or resilience factors on externalizing symptom growth nor any other protective effects on mental health symptoms. Additionally, we did not find lagged or contemporaneous within-person relations between negative life events and mental health symptoms. These results underscore the importance of considering multi-dimensional risk and resilience processes in relation to mental health symptoms in early childhood.

Authors

• Alyssa R Palmer, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
  Presenting Author

• Ann S. Masten, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Daniel Berry, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities