ISSN 1378-286X
VOLUME 7 NUMBER 1
MARCH 2004
Table of Contents and Abstracts
2
A comparative study of adolescents living in long term residential care and adolescents living with parents: Differences in cognitive and behavioural strategies, internalizing and social problems.
Zukauskiene, R.
Abstract: The present study aims to explore the extent to which cognitive and behavioural strategies and internalizing and social problems of orphaned and abandoned adolescents placed to institutions for long term residential care, differ from those of adolescents living with parents. Measures of anxiety-depression, withdrawal, and social problems, and measures of cognitive and behavioural strategies of 127 Lithuanian adolescents living in long term residential care were compared with those of 204 adolescents living with their parents. Higher levels of anxiety/depression, withdrawal and social problems were found among adolescents living in long term residential care. Adolescents living in long term residential care seemed to apply the most dysfunctional achievement strategies and did not use self-enhancing attributions. They used more task-irrelevant behaviour, were less seeking social support, used less reflective thinking and were less mastery —orientated in achievement context than adolescents living with parents. Next, in an affiliative context adolescents living in long term residential care were much more pessimistic than the adolescents, living with parents. Separation or loss of parents, followed by institutionalization is likely to have a negative impact on the cognitive and behavioural strategies adolescents use in various situations.
14
Helping vulnerable children to become more resilient
Brownrigg. A., Soulsby, A., & Place, M.
Abstract: Children whose parents have significant depressive illness are at greatly increased risk of developing mental health problems themselves as they get older. The research on resilience suggests that a programme which combines work with the child, the family, and strengthens community supports is likely to have a positive impact upon the child’s vulnerability. We describe the content and operation of such a service, and report on the results from its first I8 months of operation, which suggest that it does have a positive impact in many areas of child and family functioning
26
Mother-daughter relationships among Chinese and Romanian adoptees
Tessler, R., Adams, G., Houlihan, L., & Groza, V.
Abstract: We compare matched samples of school-aged Chinese and Romanian adoptees in America who were adopted in the early and mid 1990s. Our focus is on connections between the source country, pre-adoption history, and strain in the mother-daughter relationship. While most relationships were rated by the mothers very positively, mothers with children adopted from Romania tended to report more strain in these relationships than mothers of children adopted from China. This difference is due, in part, to a between-country difference in age at adoption (children from Romania were older on average at the time of adoption than children adopted from China), and to the different effects of age of adoption within the two study groups (age at adoption was a strong predictor of relationship functioning within the Romanian sample but was unrelated to ratings of relationship functioning in the Chinese sample.) In interpreting the results, we link age at adoption to duration of exposure to child welfare systems which were clearly better in China than in Romania during the period under study. The results extend those of previous research on international adoption by illustrating how pre-adoption exposure to different child welfare systems may affect parent-child relationships years later.
44
Treatment programs for children with sexually problematic behaviour: A
status report
Gagnon, M. M., Bégin, H., & Tremblay, C.
Abstract: This article presents an overview of treatment programs for children aged 6 to 12 who present sexually problematic behaviour. The first part of the paper describes the treatment programs; the second part addresses the assessment of these treatment programs’ effectiveness, followed by a critical analysis of the assessments themselves; and the article concludes with a discussion of new directions in research concerning children with sexually problematic behaviour.
60
Attachment representations of adolescents in institutional care
Schleiffer, R., & Mϋller, S.
Abstract: In this study, the attachment representations of adolescents living in residential care are explored. The adult attachment interview (AAI) was carried out with 72 young persons. At the same time the degree of adolescent psychopathology was recorded. For this purpose the care-givers were investigated with a parents’ questionnaire on behaviour of children and adolescents (Child Behavior Checklist: CBCL) and the adolescents themselves with a questionnaire for young people (Youth Self Report: YSR). As expected, the young persons in this sample proved to be severely burdened in psychopathological terms. There was virtually no secure attachment representation with an extensive overrepresentation of the cannot classify category. The implications of these findings for the practice of residential care inspired by attachment theory are discussed.
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