A new study published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics looked at positive childhood experiences among children and youth with special health care needs.
“Previous research has largely focused on the prevalences of adverse childhood experiences in this population, and what information there was on positive childhood experiences was fairly limited,” study author Emma Boswell told us. “We hoped to be able to establish a sort of ‘baseline’ prevalence of positive childhood experiences to guide future research, and to share information that might be helpful to families, advocates, and clinicians.”
The research team hypothesized that positive childhood experiences would be less prevalent among children and youth with special health care needs, because children and youth with special health care needs may face additional barriers to participating in positive childhood experiences that children without special healthcare needs may not experience.
“We chose to study this topic because it had not yet been investigated in depth, and we thought it was important to know about the prevalence of positive childhood experiences among children and youth with special health care needs in order to prevent and mitigate the impacts of adverse childhood experiences,” Boswell told us. “We used data from the National Survey of Children’s Health, a nationally-representative, publicly available survey. We then analyzed the data to determine the prevalence of positive childhood experiences among children and youth with special health care needs, and to examine which factors might be associated with positive childhood experience exposure.”
The researchers found that there was a lower prevalence of positive childhood experiences among children and youth with special health care needs, and that children and youth with special health care needs with certain sociodemographic characteristics had lower odds of experiencing children and youth with special health care needs than others.
“We were not particularly surprised by the results, as they matched our hypothesis and was consistent with the results of previous research,” Boswell told us. “We think that this study is an important first step to increasing the prevalence of positive childhood experiences among children and youth with special health care needs, as we now have better information about what the current status of positive childhood experience exposure looks like.”
Boswell also thinks that the results of this study provide a foundation for future research about the lived experiences of children and youth with special health care needs.
The lower prevalence of positive childhood experiences among children and youth with special health care needs is heavily influenced by a child’s external environment, at both the national and community level.
“We hope that future efforts will focus on both programs which directly seek to increase resilience among children and youth with special health care needs and policies which make it easier to experience positive childhood experiences and harder to experience experience adverse childhood experiences.”