Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Anakwenze, Obianujunwa
• Rasmussen, Andrew
• Kendall-Tackett, Kathleen

Titel

The Impact of Parental Trauma, Parenting Difficulty, and Planned Family Separation on the Behavioral Health of West African Immigrant Children in New York City

Ist Teil von

• Psychological trauma, 2021-05, Vol.13 (4), p.457-466

Ort / Verlag

United States: Educational Publishing Foundation

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

APA PsycArticles【キャンパス外アクセス可】

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Objective: The association between parental mental health difficulties and poor child outcomes is well documented. Few studies have investigated the intergenerational effects of trauma in immigrant populations. This study examined the relationships among parental trauma, parenting difficulty, duration of planned family separation, and child externalizing behavior in an archival dataset of West African voluntary and forced immigrants in New York City. We hypothesized that parenting difficulty would mediate the association between parental posttraumatic stress and child externalizing behavior and that this association would be stronger for parent-child dyads that had undergone lengthier separations during migration. Method: Ninety-one parents reported on their posttraumatic stress symptoms using the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire (HTQ) and on the behavioral health of one child between the ages of 5 and 12 years using the externalizing items of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL Externalizing). A 4-item self-report scale assessed difficulty parenting in the last month. Results: Linear regression analyses showed that parenting difficulty partially mediated the relationship between HTQ and CBCL scores. The relationship between HTQ and CBCL scores was not significant for parents separated from their children for one year or less but was significant for those never separated or separated for longer than 1 year. Higher HTQ scores were most strongly associated with higher CBCL Externalizing scores for those separated longer than one year. Conclusions: Findings suggest that children of immigrants recovering from trauma are at risk of exhibiting behavioral symptoms and highlight a potential intervention target for improving child outcomes in immigrant families. Clinical Impact Statement This study found that parental PTSD is associated with externalizing behavior in West African immigrant children, a relationship that is strongest in parent-child dyads that experienced more than 1 year of separation. Parent-focused mental health interventions may benefit both parent and child. Recognizing lengthy parent-child separation as a risk factor may inform development of supportive policies and programs as well as enable social service and health care professionals to identify and strategically offer parenting support to families that are at greatest risk of parent-child trauma transmission.