Stacks, A.M., Beeghly, M., Patridge, T., & Dexter C. (2011). Effects of Placement Type on the Language Developmental Trajectories of Maltreated Children from Infancy to Early Childhood. Child Maltreatment, https://doi.org/10.1177/1077559511427957.
The highest rate of victimization, among the 3.5 million investigated cases of child maltreatment in 2008 in the US, was for children under the age of 4. Child maltreatment can have a profound impact on children’s overall development in language, cognition, motor skills and social development. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the language development in auditory comprehension (AC) and expressive communication (EC) among maltreated children from infancy to age 6 over a 5-year period, and to assess whether different types of placements (either with biological parents, kin caregivers, or foster care) alter those developmental trajectories.
The data used for this study were taken from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW) Waves 1, 3, 4, and 5. The subsample of 963 infants (prior to their first birthday) of substantiated investigations of maltreatment were included in this study. By Wave 5, 76.2% of these children were placed in a permanent placement.
Descriptive analysis showed that maltreated children’s average language development (measured by AC and EC) fell below the population mean at each wave of the study. Conditional growth models were used to determine individual language development related to placement types. Results indicated that for children in each type of placement, mean scores for AC decreased significantly from Wave 1 to Wave 3, remained at a low level at Wave 4 (3 years old) and increased to its original level (Wave 1) by Wave 5. A similar trend was also observed for EC. There was a significant decrease from Wave 1 to Wave 3. While the mean EC scores remained low for Wave 4, there was an increase by Wave 5 which was still lower than the population mean.
The results suggested that maltreated children were experiencing significant difficulties in language development. Providing speech and language assessment, and services to maltreated children, wherever placed, is crucial to mitigate these language development difficulties during their developmental milestones.
Maltreatment is more likely to occur in families that are at higher sociodemographic risk and the majority of families in the present sample were from low socio-economic backgrounds in this study. Because all of the children in this study experienced maltreatment, it is not possible to determine if language delay is related to the maltreatment of the children experienced or the presence of familial social demographic risk factors.