Psychosocial Adjustment Among Refugee Children

Refugee children are faced with multiple stressors. These stressors include unresolved issues with country of origin, transition to a new country, and long-term adjustment. War is a traumatic situation. For children who have gone through the trauma of war, parents may contribute one of the major influences to their psychosocial adjustment. The purpose of this study was to assess the role that parental mental health, as measured by the Hopkins Symptom Checklist - 25 (HSCL-25) and parenting sense of competence as measured by the Parenting Sense of Competence Scale (PSOC), plays in children’s psychosocial adjustment to war trauma using delinquency as measured by the Delinquency Behavior Measure and interpersonal competence as measured by the Interpersonal Competence Scale (ICS) as outcome measures. Sixty-eight Sudanese refugee families were evaluated. The parents were asked to fill out the HSCL-25 and the PSOC, and their children were asked to fill out the Delinquency Behavior Measure (subscale I), and the Interpersonal Competence Scale. Correlations and multiple regressions were run on the data. The results of the current study indicated that good parental mental health was associated with good interpersonal competence in refugee children. Further, that there was an association between parental sense of competence and children’s interpersonal competence. However, although these associations existed, one did not necessarily explain the other. No relationship was found between children’s delinquent acting out and parents’ mental health or sense of competence. The results suggested that while parental factors impact refugee children’s adjustment, parental mental health and sense of competence may not be the biggest predictors of children’s interpersonal and prosocial/antisocial outcomes