In the wake of divorce, illness, violence and other problems that can unsettle homes, countless young children are liable to experience temporary separations from one or both parents before packing their knapsack for kindergarten. Published in the May/June issue of Ambulatory Pediatrics, a new, community-wide study from Rochester, New York, warns that such kids are at increased risk for learning difficulties and that these separations are good predictors of which children may require special educational interventions to succeed.
Previous research on parent-child separation has concentrated on children in foster or kinship care, who are known to often experience considerable emotional, behavioral and developmental problems. Yet little is known about the impact of separation more generally, especially in less formalized situations in which one or more parents temporarily leaves.
"In most cases, separation is a marker of instability. We suspect that homes in which children are separated from their parents may be less nurturing environments. Parents are less apt to be reading to their kids or taking time to teach them new skills, such as tying shoes, practicing their letters or penning their names," said Sandy Jee, M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor of Pediatrics at the University of Rochester Medical Center's Golisano Children's Hospital, who led the study. "Kindergarten can be a wet-cement year for many kids, so it's important that we start their educational trajectories on the best paths possible."
The study enrolled 1,619 children between ages 4 and 6 who were entering Rochester City School District kindergarten classrooms in the fall of 2003. Parents or caregivers were asked if their child had ever been away from a parent for more than a month, and if so, if the separation occurred once, twice, or more than three times. These adults also completed the Parent's Appraisal of Children's Experiences (PACE) survey to measure their children's developmental skills by various observable behaviors (e.g., if the child can cut with scissors; if he or she can tie their shoes). The results were then analyzed to produce four 4-point scales, each measuring different dimensions of healthy development, including: how well a child learns new tasks; how well he or she uses language to express ideas; how literate he or she is (e.g., can he or she read his own written name?); and the quality of his or her speech (e.g., do other people often have difficulty understanding the child?).
"We found that 18 percent of these urban children had been separated from their parents at any point in their childhood," Jee said. "This was surprising, but not unimaginable, since poverty is often linked with volatility in homes. In fact, 7 percent of these kids had been separated two or more times."