Evolving Our Understanding: Housing Instability as an ACE for Young Children.

Autor: DeCandia CJ; Artemis Associates, LLC, 15 Main St. Suite 224, Watertown, MA 02472 USA., Volk KT; C4 Innovations, Needham, MA USA., Unick GJ; School of Social Work, University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD USA.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Adversity and resilience science [Advers Resil Sci] 2022; Vol. 3 (4), pp. 365-380. Date of Electronic Publication: 2022 Oct 26.
DOI: 10.1007/s42844-022-00080-y
Abstrakt: We investigated the conceptualization and impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in a sample of 231 children ages 3-5 living in poverty and experiencing homelessness, focusing specifically on caregiver well-being and housing instability. Data was collected using the Neurodevelopmental Ecological Screening Tool (NEST), which screens for developmental risk and resilience across three domains (neurodevelopmental, caregiver, and environment). We used structural equation modelling (SEM) to test the association between domains and ACE scores and assessed the impact on neurodevelopmental constructs. Fifty-five percent of the sample had high ACE scores (> 3), which were associated with lower attention, social skills, and emotional regulation. ACEs were strongly associated with 0.17 standard deviation units of higher levels of caregiver distress ( p  < .001), which was also associated with 0.26 standard deviation units of lower levels of child neurodevelopmental functioning ( p  = .001). For each unit increase in housing instability, there was a three-fourths increase in ACE (0.78 ACE at p  = .004); four or more moves were associated with the worst neurodevelopmental outcomes (53% of the sample). We must use an ecological, developmental lens to understand how early adversity impacts children, at what age, and in what context. Housing stability plays a critical role in developmental well-being and should be accounted for in conceptualizations of child ACE scales. Caregiver and child relationships are reciprocal, and so the impacts of ACEs are also bidirectional. Our policies and practices at individual, community, and systemic levels should account for these dynamics to improve child well-being.
Competing Interests: Conflict of InterestThe authors declare no competing interests.
(© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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