Читать книгу Introduction to Abnormal Child and Adolescent Psychology - Robert Weis - Страница 105

Until now, we have focused chiefly on the immediate causes of childhood disorders. These causes include the child’s genotype, brain structure and functioning, learning experiences, thoughts and feelings, and relationships. These immediate determinants of children’s functioning are often referred to as proximal risk factors because they can directly affect children’s well-being. For example, a genetic disorder can lead to low intellectual functioning, whereas exposure to harsh, authoritarian parenting can contribute to children’s oppositional and defiant behavior. The overwhelming majority of research addressing the causes of child psychopathology focuses on proximal risk factors because they are typically the easiest to study (Tolan, 2016).

Researchers have increasingly turned their attention to other, distal risk factors for child behavior problems. Distal risk factors are social, cultural, and broad environmental influences on development. One important distal risk factor is socioeconomic status (SES). Children from low-SES families are at increased risk for developing behavioral and emotional disorders compared to youths from middle- and high-SES backgrounds. Other distal risk factors include family structure (e.g., single-parent families), neighborhood quality (e.g., population density, crime), and broader social–cultural values (e.g., importance of school, family, or religion; Wadsworth, Evans, Grant, Carter, & Duffy, 2016).

Distal risk factors, like poverty and neighborhood disadvantage, can directly influence child development. For example, infants and toddlers who ingest lead are at risk for developing behavioral and learning problems. Typically, youths are exposed to lead from paint that flakes off the walls of older homes. Children from low-SES families are disproportionately exposed to lead-based paint because they often live in older, more dilapidated homes. Consequently, rates of lead poisoning, and subsequent neurological damage, are greatest among youths from low-SES families (Jennings & Fox, 2015).

Distal risk factors can also indirectly influence child development. For example, the degree to which parents argue over financial concerns predicts the extent to which they use harsh discipline with their children. Their harsh parenting behavior, in turn, predicts the emergence of their children’s behavior problems. In this case, financial stress contributes to children’s behavior problems indirectly, by increasing problematic parenting behavior (Lee, Lee, & August, 2012).