Early Childhood Maltreatment and Resilience Profiles

Background and Purpose: Although children with a history of maltreatment are at heightened risk for adverse outcomes, some maltreated children continue to thrive and exhibit resilience. Early childhood is especially crucial for resilience because it represents a critical period that lays the foundation for subsequent successful development. Despite its importance, little is known about resilience during early childhood among maltreated children. Further, many existing studies have either examined only a certain domain(s) of resilience (e.g., behavioral resilience) or treated resilience as an overarching construct, and little attention has been paid to potential variations and heterogeneity in resilience among young maltreated children. Discovering distinct profiles of resilience is critical to inform the development of early interventions that can promote optimal and balanced resilient functioning across different domains of development in young children. To this end, the current study aimed to identify distinct profiles of resilience across multiple domains of functioning (cognitive, emotional, behavioral, social) among child welfare-involved children in early childhood.

Methods: We used data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW-II). The study sample included 827 children between the ages of 3 and 5 years. Resilience was assessed using multiple instruments. For cognitive domain, verbal ability and receptive language skills were measures using the Preschool Language Scale (PLS-3) expressive communication sub-scale and auditory comprehension sub-scale, respectively. For social domain, prosocial behavior and socialization were assessed, using The Social Skills Rating System (SSRS) and The Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale Screener (VABSS), respectively. For emotional domain, emotional regulation and anxiety/depression were assessed, using The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL/1.5-5) emotionally reactive scale and anxious/depressed scale. For behavioral domain, child aggressive behavior and attention were measured using the CBCL aggression scale and attention problem scale. Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was conducted using Mplus v7.4 to identify distinct profiles of resilience.

Results: Three distinctive resilience profiles were identified from the LPA analysis: 1) The low cognitive resilience class (24%) included children who showed the lowest levels of expressive and auditory language development as well as lower levels of social functioning, yet moderate to high emotional and behavioral functioning; 2) low emotional and behavioral resilience class (19%) consisted of children who showed the lowest levels of emotional and behavior adaptations, yet above-average levels cognitive functioning; and 3) multi-domain high resilience class (57%) included children who exhibited high levels of competence across all domains of functioning.

Conclusions and Implications: Our findings provide empirical support for resilience as a multi-faceted construct. Practitioners working with child welfare-involved children should adopt a strengths-based approach and promote comprehensive resilience building across all developmental domains as opposed to only focusing on reducing psychopathology. Relatedly, based on our finding that children may exhibit positive adaptation in some areas but not in other areas, practitioners need to identify those domains in which children struggle to obtain competence. Conducting early assessment of developmental adaptations across difference domains of functioning and providing individualized, targeted intervention services may be beneficial in fostering optimal and balanced resilient development among young, child welfare-involved children.