ARTICULOS DE ACTUALIZACION EN PEIATRIS SOCIAL

1. CHILD WITNESSES WITH ‘MILD’ INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES ARE ASRELIABLE AS OTHER CHILDREN WITH SAME MENTAL AGE

Deirdre Brown

Research demonstrates reliability of their evidence and paves the way for this vulnerable group to participate properly in legal systems.  

Child witnesses with ‘mild’ intellectual disabilities are typically just as reliable as other children of the same mental age, according to our research. We found, for example, that the testimony of a 12-year-old child who has the thinking skills of a 9-year-old is as detailed and reliable as that of a typical 9-year-old child. ‘Mild’ means children whose mental functioning is in the bottom 1 per cent of the population.

These findings from our research, conducted in the UK, demonstrate that once investigators know such a child’s developmental or mental age, they can pitch interviews at the level they would adopt for a typically developing child of that age.

“Investigators should know a child’s developmental or mental age before interviews so that they can tailor questions appropriately, assess testimony realistically and act confidently on the evidence.”

Higher risk of abuse

Children with intellectual disabilities are particularly vulnerable, but they are often excluded from legal proceedings. Studies suggest that one in three children with disabilities experiences some form of abuse or maltreatment, partly because such children rely more on others for care. Their needs may be so great and resources may be so stressed – either within families or in institutional settings – that they are at risk of abuse. Yet maltreatment of such children is less likely to be investigated because, according to research, legal systems, police and interviewers typically lack confidence in what they say. Practitioners, lawyers, judges and jurors should therefore be informed that children with ‘mild’ intellectual disabilities have the same accuracy of recall as do children of the same mental or developmental age. Disseminating this finding could improve child protection considerably.

Early, open-ended interviews best for child witnesses

Our findings also show that children should be interviewed early on. All the children in our study, regardless of their intellectual abilities, recalled more information more accurately after six months if they had first been interviewed after only a short delay. Also, open-ended questioning produced higher-quality recall than did a more focussed style of questioning that some professionals adopt when they interact with a child with intellectual disability.

We examined the performance of children whose mental functioning was in the bottom 1 per cent of the population. Almost all attended special schools and had special curricula and teaching aid. The children with intellectual disabilities were between 7 and 12 years old and had one of two levels of disability: 46 were in the ‘mild’ range and 34 in the more severe ‘moderate’ range. We studied an additional 116 children with typical intellectual development, making a total of 196 children. All took part in an event at their school and were later questioned about it.

The interviews followed a protocol that is internationally promoted as the best way to assess allegations of child maltreatment. Half the children were interviewed a week after the event and then again six months later. The other half were interviewed only once, six months after the event.

Severity of intellectual disability is important

The children with ‘mild’ intellectual disability typically had poorer recall than did mainstream children of the same age. However, their performance almost invariably matched that of children of the same mental or developmental age. This was true with regard both to details about the event and to how they answered leading or misleading questions that might be used in legal cross-examination. The narrative quality of their storytelling was also comparable.

Our findings make a compelling case that investigators should be told the mental age of a child with intellectual disabilities before interviewing the child. Investigators often lack this information. Studies show that disabilities are often neither recognised nor documented and that judges, for example, often don’t modify their questioning to take disabilities into account.

Providing information about children’s mental age – and acting on it – would be a considerable breakthrough. Most people with intellectual disability don’t look different from anyone else, and they may not act differently from the mainstream population. Their disability may not become clear for some time. So being briefed on mental age is important. Even then, it can be challenging to sit in front of someone who looks like a 12-year-old and keep in mind that the person is functioning like a 9-year-old.

Our findings were different for children with more severe ‘moderate’ disability. They had poorer recall than did mainstream children of the same intellectual age. So a 10-year-old with ‘moderate’ intellectual disability, perhaps giving him a mental age of 4, did not recall things as well as a typically developing 4-year-old child.

This finding doesn’t mean that the evidence such children give is unreliable. Rather, it shows that knowledge of such disability is vital, in particular for determining whether to use a more nuanced style of questioning. All the children we interviewed responded more accurately to broad open-ended questions than to narrow, focussed questions and were able to provide relevant information in response to them. This was just as true for children with ‘moderate’ intellectual disabilities, but they struggled to provide fuller information. Having clear knowledge of their intellectual abilities would help interviewers to know the level of structured prompts that this group requires at particular points to elicit the most—and the most accurate—information.

Investigators should know mental age of child witness

Our research expands knowledge on the reliability of childhood testimony, studies of which have tended to focus on children with mainstream abilities. It tells us that investigators can have the same level of confidence in children with mild intellectual disabilities as they do in children who don’t have a disability, provided they know the mental age of the child and act accordingly. Conveying this knowledge would be inexpensive and wouldn’t require a lot of training. Doing so would be a highly cost effective policy shift that could be enacted relatively easily and offer enhanced legal protection to a vulnerable group of children.

Policy Implications

Direct resources towards effective training and review of interviewing practice, and, importantly, explore how to provide interviewers with relevant information about the child and their developmental level prior to an interview.

Practical Implications

Seek information from those that know the child, and from any formal assessments that may have been conducted, about the developmental and cognitive level of the child, to help plan and pitch the questioning approach effectively.

Deirdre Brown

Senior Lecturer, School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Posted on: Wednesday 2 March 2016

Original research and references

1. Brown DA, Lewis CN & Lamb ME An Early Interview Improves Delayed Event Memory in Children With Intellectual DisabilitiesChild Development, 86, July/August 2015

http://childandfamilyblog.com/child-witnesses/?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=subscribers

Uno de mi blogs favoritos: http://childandfamilyblog.com/

2.- FAMILY INSTABILITY HITS BOYS HARDER THAN GIRLS AND HAS

DOUBLE POVERTY’S INFLUENCE ON CHILDHOOD AGGRESSION

Sara McLanahan

Schools should focus on sensitive treatment for the dominant legacies of family instability – disruptive behaviour and anxiety.  

Increasing family instability, caused by divorce and remarriage (as well as the formation and dissolution of cohabiting unions), is having a major influence on children’s social-emotional development, especially among boys, according to latest research.

Education policy should address the impacts of instability and expand beyond its focus on improving test scores, which, for many children, is too narrow an approach for securing long-term success. It must also tackle the mix of aggression, anxiety and other long-term mental health problems, particularly among boys, that can be dominant legacies of family instability.

“Early support would be better than coming down hard on misbehaving children, particularly boys, which can turn them against school so they fall behind, leading to damaging spill over effects.”

These difficulties undermine development of so-called “non-cognitive skills,” such as the ability to pay attention and persist with a task, as well as self-confidence and the ability to get along with peers, which may be just as important as test scores in the long run. A policy shift is urgent because recent increases in family instability have put more and more children at risk of missing out on developing important social-emotional skills.

These recommendations spring from our research in the United States examining the causal effects of different types of family instability on children. We found that divorce and separation play a limited role in shaping children’s cognitive abilities, such as language and mathematical skills, which are tested in conventional school examinations. Maternal education and poverty are much more important in this area. In contrast, family instability plays a much bigger role than mothers’ education or poverty in the development of “social-emotional” skills. For example, family instability has twice as much influence as poverty does on whether children develop aggressive behavior. It is on par with poverty in causing childhood anxiety and shyness.

Our findings show that losing a biological father when parents break up is generally worse for children’s development than the arrival of a stepfather in their lives. The breakup of a two-parent family also typically has a more negative emotional impact for white children, whereas the entrance of a stepparent has a more negative impact for Hispanic children.

The significant role that mental health or social-emotional skills play in individual success is becoming better understood. For example, the U.S. Perry Preschool program for three- and four-year-olds from disadvantaged families was designed in the 1960s to improve “cognitive” scores in language and math tests. It was initially deemed a failure because early gains in test scores faded over time. However, when researchers looked at these children 40 years later, they found that those who participated in the program were more likely to finish high school than their peers and more likely to have positive outcomes in adulthood, notably more stable relationships and less criminality. Many people now believe that the program, which was designed to enhance cognitive skills, actually affected children’s social-emotional skills. This seems to have conferred lifelong benefits that perhaps outweigh those that might have sprung from the sought-after but unachieved higher test scores.

All this means that policy makers need to consider how to better prevent children from being handicapped by emotional or behavioural problems such as aggression, shyness and anxiety. Children should be supported properly as they go through the now common experience of family instability. Teachers should know more about the part that family disruption can play in childhood difficulties. Schools should have mental health counsellors and identify children at risk. When children have a fever or a broken arm, they receive expert help. Likewise, schools should be sensitive to how children typically react to family breakdown and reorganization. Early support would be better than coming down hard on misbehaving children, particularly boys, which can turn them against school so they fall behind, leading to damaging spill-over effects.

It is important to understand the role of gender in these issues. Emotional wellbeing appears to be much more compromised by family instability among boys than it is among girls. The impact of instability on “non-cognitive” skills is two to three times greater for boys, we found.

The reasons are not well understood. It may be that the loss of a biological father is more important to boys than to girls. Possibly, the loss is a marker for a lot of other sources of instability – new men moving in and out, the arrival of half-siblings, a more complex household – to which boys may be more sensitive.

Whatever the reasons, it is worth asking whether this greater emotional sensitivity among boys helps explain their increasing difficulties in school. The gender gap between girls’ and boys’ achievement in school, which has opened up in the US and other Western countries since about 1980, has coincided with a great deal of family instability.

Policy Implications

Education policy should address the impacts of instability and expand beyond its focus on improving test scores, which, for many children, is too narrow an approach for securing long-term success.

Practical Implications

Schools need to tackle the mix of aggression, anxiety and other long-term mental health problems, particularly among boys, that can be dominant legacies of family instability.

Sara McLanahan

William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, Princeton University, USA.

Original research and references

1. Dohoon Lee and Sara McLanahan Family Structure Transitions and Child Development: Instability, Selection, and Population Heterogeneity American Sociological Review 1–26 (2015)

3.- CHILDREN RAISED WITHIN MARRIAGE DO BETTER ON AVERAGE. WHY?

David C. Ribar

Does marriage lead to good or successful parenting, or are people with the traits of good parents more likely to marry?  

Plenty of research shows that children who are raised by their married, biological parents tend to be healthier (both mentally and physically) and do better in school, than children who are not raised within marriage. But why?

Is the reason that married couples tend to have more resources, both financially and otherwise? That they can run a household more efficiently by specializing in different tasks and coordinating their efforts? That together they have a larger social network to rely on for support when things get tough? In short, what are the mechanisms through which marriage operates to enhance children’s wellbeing?

“The advantages of marriage for children’s wellbeing will be hard to replicate through policies other than those that bolster marriage itself.”

And beyond these mechanisms, is there something intrinsic to marriage itself that directly leads to better outcomes for children? At a time when so many American children are growing up with single or cohabiting parents, that’s an important question. What’s the best way to help all children thrive? Is it through policies that will help unmarried parents and families take advantage of the same mechanisms that married parents enjoy and thereby help their children have better life outcomes? Or through policies that encourage parents to get married and stay married?

When we look at the relationship between marriage and children’s wellbeing, the question of causality looms large. If children of married parents receive better parenting, for example, does that mean that marriage leads to good or successful parenting, or does it mean that people with the traits of good parents are more likely to marry?

Researchers call this a selection problem; that is, it’s possible that married parents tend to select marriage because they have certain qualities—higher incomes, more education, larger social networks—that also tend to produce better outcomes for children. Sophisticated statistical techniques can help sort out this problem. Though I won’t go into the technical details, researchers have used such techniques to examine the mechanisms through which marriage might improve children’s lives, looking for causal effects.

For a recent issue of the   Future of Children , I reviewed research on a variety of mechanisms that might explain why children of married parents fare better than other children. Some of the mechanisms have been well studied, including parents’ income, fathers’ involvement with their children, parents’ physical and mental health, parenting quality, health insurance, home ownership, parents’ relationships, and family stability. Others have received less attention, including net wealth, constraints on borrowing, and informal insurance through social networks.

All of these mechanisms tend to vary by family structure (that is, whether the children have married parents or live in another family arrangement). All of them may affect some aspect of children’s wellbeing, such as health or educational attainment. Yet when researchers study them, they typically find that a given mechanism explains some but not all of the relationship between family structure and children’s outcomes.

For example, a recent study hypothesized that higher household income and greater access to health insurance might explain why children of married parents generally have better health than other children. The authors confirmed that family structure was associated with income and insurance, and that income and insurance were in turn associated with children’s health; however, even among children with similar household income and similar access to health insurance, those whose parents were married were also healthier. Thus, although the researchers found support for their hypothesis that differences in income and insurance produced differences in children’s health, they also found that family structure had other associations with health beyond income and insurance. This pattern of partial explanation is repeated across many, many studies.

The principal exception to this pattern comes from studies of family stability. When researchers measure instability by the simple number of transitions between different family arrangements (for example, from living with married to parents to living with a single parent after a divorce to living in a stepfamily), they find that instability often accounts for most if not all of the associations between family structure and children’s outcomes. So stability could be the mechanism through which marriage improves children’s wellbeing. Still, it could also be that these studies haven’t really explained why family structure matters; rather, they may have just found that counting the number of transitions is the best way to measure family structure.

What can we conclude from the fact that almost wherever we look, mechanisms such as higher income, more education, better access to health insurance and so on don’t fully explain the association between American children’s wellbeing and marriage? One reasonable conclusion is that the advantages of marriage for children’s wellbeing will be hard to replicate through policies other than those that bolster marriage itself. While helping unmarried parents increase their incomes, spend more time with their kids, find better child care, etc., would surely benefit children, these are likely to be, at best, only partial substitutes for marriage itself. The advantages of marriage for children appear to be the sum of many, many parts.

Photo: Chris Parfitt, Creative Commons.

Policy Implications

The US Government should shift resources, protections, and opportunities back toward workers and families in the middle and lower parts of the income distribution—it’s no coincidence that marriage rates have declined as these groups have been marginalized.

David C. Ribar

Professorial Research Fellow, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne, Australia

Original research and references

1. Ribar DC Why Marriage Matters for Child Wellbeing Future of Children 25, no. 2 (2015): 11-27

http://childandfamilyblog.com/children-marriage-do-better-why/

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