Dynamics of childhood adversity and poor physical and mental health in children experiencing high adversity: Findings from the DANLIFE cohort.

Abstract

Background: Children in families navigating significant adversity often face co-occurring physical and mental health problems, which together can contribute to substantial marginalization across the life course. These children and their families may greatly benefit from targeted interventions to disrupt accumulating vulnerability, which requires empirical evidence on the underlying dynamics of adversity and health problems throughout childhood.

Methods: We investigated associations between childhood adversities (material deprivation, experiences of loss or threat of loss, and family dynamics) and hospitalizations for mental and physical health problems across four developmental periods among 11,978 children who experienced high rates of family adversity. We used data from the Danish Life Course (DANLIFE) register-based cohort study and applied cross-lagged networks models. Hospitalizations were identified through inpatient, outpatient, and emergency hospital contacts.

Results: We found clear evidence of reciprocal associations between childhood adversities and physical and mental health problems across childhood, alongside strong autoregressive effects within adversity and health domains, indicating vicious circles of reinforcing vulnerability. Conditional on high health problems in infancy, childhood adversity was not found to be associated with additional health problems throughout the rest of childhood. Child health problems were, however, positively associated with subsequent adversity across childhood.

Conclusions: Dynamics of childhood adversity and poor health give rise to complex reinforcing patterns of vulnerability over time. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the emergence of vulnerability resulting from childhood adversity and poor health in children, highlighting the importance of embracing the complex nature of these emergent phenomena, both in research and intervention.