Human Services News

From EurekAlert! - Breaking News:

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.

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.

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.

"We found that 18 percent of these urban children had been separated from their parents at any point in their childhood," Jee said.

Children who have been separated at any point scored significantly worse both on the 4-point scales measuring their ability to learn new tasks and their pre-literacy skills.

Jee and her colleagues do not know yet which types of separations might have the most deleterious effects on kids' early learning, since the survey did not ask specific reasons for the separation.

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