Risk and protective factors of mental health in children in residential care: A nationwide study from Luxembourg.

BACKGROUND: Children who grow up in residential care are at high risk for mental health problems. Existing studies have focused on negative mental health indicators and risk factors. There has been less emphasis on identifying protective factors, particularly those associated with positive mental health outcomes. OBJECTIVE: This study explores positive and negative dimensions of mental health and their links to risk and protective factors in children who have experienced early adversity and trauma and have been placed in residential care. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTINGS: Children aged 11 to 18 (N = 264) were recruited from residential care homes in Luxembourg, a small, high-income European country. METHODS: The children completed self-report questionnaires on mental health, perceived stress, school pressure, and participation. Residential care workers provided information on demographic factors, developmental and care history, and pre-care experiences of early adversity and trauma. RESULTS: Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that subjective well-being, internalising problems, and externalising problems are separate yet interconnected components of mental health. Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes models showed that individual, contextual, and psychosocial predictors contribute differentially to positive and negative mental health outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: Using a national sample of children in residential care in Luxembourg, this research indicates that subjective well-being, internalising problems, and externalising problems are distinct but related aspects of mental health. 'Child participation' and 'school pressure' displayed strong links with positive mental health outcomes and may serve as a potential path for improving public health interventions for children in care.

Subjective Well-Being of Adolescents in Luxembourg, Germany, and Brazil During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

PURPOSE: This study explores adolescent well-being during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in two high-income countries from Europe and one middle-income country from South America. The aim is to investigate the correlates of different dimensions of subjective well-being in 10- to 16-year-olds from different cultural contexts. METHODS: An online, self-report questionnaire was completed by 1,613 adolescents in Luxembourg, Germany, and Brazil between May and July 2020. The outcome variables were measures of life satisfaction and emotional well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study included a range of sociodemographic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal covariates. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and latent variable structural equational modeling. RESULTS: A two-factor model of subjective well-being, consisting of life satisfaction and emotional well-being latent constructs, fitted well with this sample data for Luxembourg, Germany, and Brazil. Results showed that gender, socioeconomic status, intrapersonal factors, quantity and type of schoolwork, and relationships with adults were important common predictors of individual differences in subjective well-being during COVID-19. Fear of illness emerged as the strongest correlate of emotional well-being across the three countries. CONCLUSIONS: This study indicates that girls and adolescents from low-income homes may be especially vulnerable to negative secondary impacts of COVID-19 that can affect mental health. It identified several common correlates of subjective well-being in adolescents from different cultural settings, including factors that may be changeable, such as the following: the way adults listen to adolescents, schoolwork during distant learning, and fear of illness. Findings can inform the development of quality interventions for promoting the well-being of adolescents during a global pandemic.

Practices and experiences of distant education during the COVID-19 pandemic: The perspectives of six- to sixteen-year-olds from three high-income countries.

The paper explores children's perspectives of distance education, their learning experiences and school satisfaction in Luxembourg, Germany and Switzerland during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data stem from an online questionnaire completed by 1773 primary and secondary school children aged 6-16. While the paper uses quantitative and qualitative data, it aligns with the qualitative research tradition and predominantly uses an inductive approach. The findings show that teachers offered varied types of distance education and that parents supported children. The children's contact time with teachers and their time spent on schoolwork varied within and between countries. Their school satisfaction dropped in the three countries. The paper calls for training and development on distant education.

Effects of an Early Literacy Intervention for Linguistically Diverse Children: A Quasi-Experimental Study.

Phonological awareness and letter-sound knowledge underpin children's early literacy acquisition. Promoting these foundational skills in kindergarten should therefore lead to a better response to formal literacy instruction once started. The present study evaluated a 12-week early literacy intervention for linguistically diverse children who are learning to read in German. The study was set in Luxembourg where kindergarten education is in Luxembourgish and children learn to read in German in Grade 1 of primary school. One hundred and eighty-nine children (mean age = 5;8 years) were assigned to an early literacy intervention in Luxembourgish or to a business as usual control group. Trained teachers delivered the intervention to entire classes, four times a week, during the last year of kindergarten. The early literacy program included direct instruction in phonological awareness and letter-knowledge, while promoting print and book awareness and literacy engagement. Children were assessed pre-intervention, immediately post-intervention and at a 9 months delayed follow-up using measures in Luxembourgish and in German. At the end of the intervention, children in the intervention group performed significantly better than the control group on phonological awareness and letter-knowledge measures in Luxembourgish and the gains in phonological awareness were maintained at 9 months follow-up. The effects generalized to measures of phonological awareness, word-level reading comprehension and spelling in German (effect sizes d > 0.25), but not to German single word/pseudoword reading, at delayed follow-up. Intervention programs designed to support foundational literacy skills can be successfully implemented by regular teachers in a play-based kindergarten context. The findings suggest that early literacy intervention before school entry can produce educationally meaningful effects in linguistically diverse learners.

Rapid Automatized Naming and Explicit Phonological Processing in Children With Developmental Dyslexia: A Study With Portuguese-Speaking Children in Brazil.

Many studies have shown that children with reading difficulties present deficits in rapid automatized naming (RAN) and phonological awareness skills. The aim of this study was to examine RAN and explicit phonological processing in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children with developmental dyslexia and to explore the ability of RAN to discriminate between children with and without dyslexia. Participants were 30 children with a clinical diagnosis of dyslexia established by the Brazilian Dyslexia Association and 30 children with typical development. Children were aged between 7 and 12, and groups were matched for chronological age and sex. They completed a battery of tests that are commonly used in Brazil for diagnosing dyslexia, consisting of the Wechsler Intelligence Test for Children (WISC-IV) as well as tests of single word and non-word reading, RAN, and the profile of phonological abilities test. Results indicate that the cognitive profile of this group of children, with a clinical diagnosis of dyslexia, showed preserved skills in the four subscales of the WISC-IV (verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, working memory, and processing speed) and on the profile of phonological abilities test. Groups significantly differed on the reading tests (word and non-word) and RAN measures, with medium to large effect sizes for RAN. Classification and regression tree analysis revealed that RAN was a good predictor for dyslexia diagnosis, with an overall classification accuracy rate of 88.33%.

Specific language impairment in language-minority children from low-income families.

BACKGROUND: Recent evidence suggests that specific language impairment (SLI) might be secondary to general cognitive processing limitations in the domain of executive functioning. Previous research has focused almost exclusively on monolingual children with SLI and offers little evidence-based guidance on executive functioning in bilingual children with SLI. Studying bilinguals with SLI is important, especially in the light of increasing evidence that bilingualism can bring advantages in certain domains of executive functioning. AIMS: To determine whether executive functioning represents an area of difficulty for bilingual language-minority children with SLI and, if so, which specific executive processes are affected. METHODS & PROCEDURES: This cross-cultural research was conducted with bilingual children from Luxembourg and monolingual children from Portugal who all had Portuguese as their first language. The data from 81 eight-year-olds from the following three groups were analysed: (1) 15 Portuguese-Luxembourgish bilinguals from Luxembourg with an SLI diagnosis; (2) 33 typically developing Portuguese-Luxembourgish bilinguals from Luxembourg; and (3) 33 typically developing Portuguese-speaking monolinguals from Portugal. Groups were matched on first language, ethnicity, chronological age and socioeconomic status, and they did not differ in nonverbal intelligence. Children completed a battery of tests tapping: expressive and receptive vocabulary, syntactic comprehension, verbal and visuospatial working memory, selective attention and interference suppression. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: The bilingual SLI group performed equally well compared with their typically developing peers on measures of visuospatial working memory, but had lower scores than both control groups on tasks of verbal working memory. On measures of selective attention and interference suppression, typically developing children who were bilingual outperformed their monolingual counterparts. For selective attention, performance of the bilingual SLI group did not differ significantly from the controls. For interference suppression the bilingual SLI group performed significantly less well than typically developing bilinguals but not monolinguals. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: This research provides further support to the position that SLI is not a language-specific disorder. The study indicates that although bilingual children with SLI do not demonstrate the same advantages in selective attention and interference suppression as typically developing bilinguals, they do not lag behind typically developing monolinguals in these domains of executive functioning. This finding raises the possibility that bilingualism might represent a protective factor against some of the cognitive limitations that are associated with SLI in monolinguals.

Executive functioning and reading achievement in school: a study of Brazilian children assessed by their teachers as "poor readers".

This study examined executive functioning and reading achievement in 106 6- to 8-year-old Brazilian children from a range of social backgrounds of whom approximately half lived below the poverty line. A particular focus was to explore the executive function profile of children whose classroom reading performance was judged below standard by their teachers and who were matched to controls on chronological age, sex, school type (private or public), domicile (Salvador/BA or São Paulo/SP) and socioeconomic status. Children completed a battery of 12 executive function tasks that were conceptual tapping cognitive flexibility, working memory, inhibition and selective attention. Each executive function domain was assessed by several tasks. Principal component analysis extracted four factors that were labeled "Working Memory/Cognitive Flexibility," "Interference Suppression," "Selective Attention," and "Response Inhibition." Individual differences in executive functioning components made differential contributions to early reading achievement. The Working Memory/Cognitive Flexibility factor emerged as the best predictor of reading. Group comparisons on computed factor scores showed that struggling readers displayed limitations in Working Memory/Cognitive Flexibility, but not in other executive function components, compared to more skilled readers. These results validate the account that working memory capacity provides a crucial building block for the development of early literacy skills and extends it to a population of early readers of Portuguese from Brazil. The study suggests that deficits in working memory/cognitive flexibility might represent one contributing factor to reading difficulties in early readers. This might have important implications for how educators might intervene with children at risk of academic under achievement.

Working memory screening, school context, and socioeconomic status: an analysis of the effectiveness of the working memory rating scale in Brazil.

OBJECTIVE: The study explores the psychometric properties of the Brazilian-Portuguese version of the Working Memory Rating Scale (WMRS-Br) in a population of 355 young children from diverse socioeconomic status and schooling backgrounds. METHOD: Public and private school teachers completed the WMRS-Br and children were assessed on a range of objective cognitive measures of fluid intelligence, working memory, and attention. RESULTS: Reliability and validity of the WMRS-Br were excellent across the public and private school sample. The WMRS-Br manifested substantial links with objective measures of working memory and medium links with selective attention, switching, and interference suppression. Confirmatory factor analyses suggest that a shorter version of the scale provides an adequate fit to the data. CONCLUSION: The WMRS-Br represents a valid screening tool in a Latin American context that has the potential to improve the early detection of working memory deficits in children growing up in poverty.

Effects of impoverished environmental conditions on working memory performance.

This cross-cultural study investigates the impact of background experience on four verbal and visuo-spatial working memory (WM) tasks. A total of 84 children from low-income families were recruited from the following groups: (1) Portuguese immigrant children from Luxembourg impoverished in terms of language experience; (2) Brazilian children deprived in terms of scholastic background; (3) Portuguese children from Portugal with no disadvantage in either scholastic or language background. Children were matched on age, gender, fluid intelligence, and socioeconomic status and completed four simple and complex span tasks of WM and a vocabulary measure. Results indicate that, despite large differences in their backgrounds and language abilities, the groups exhibited comparable performance on the visuo-spatial tasks dot matrix and odd-one-out and on the verbal simple span task digit recall. Group differences emerged on the verbal complex span task counting recall with children from Luxembourg and Portugal outperforming children from disadvantaged schools in Brazil. The study suggests that whereas contributions of prior knowledge to digit span, dot matrix, and odd-one-out are likely to be minimal, background experience can affect performance on counting recall. Implications for testing WM capacity in children growing up in poverty are discussed.

Bilingualism enriches the poor: enhanced cognitive control in low-income minority children.

This study explores whether the cognitive advantage associated with bilingualism in executive functioning extends to young immigrant children challenged by poverty and, if it does, which specific processes are most affected. In the study reported here, 40 Portuguese-Luxembourgish bilingual children from low-income immigrant families in Luxembourg and 40 matched monolingual children from Portugal completed visuospatial tests of working memory, abstract reasoning, selective attention, and interference suppression. Two broad cognitive factors of executive functioning-representation (abstract reasoning and working memory) and control (selective attention and interference suppression)-emerged from principal component analysis. Whereas there were no group differences in representation, the bilinguals performed significantly better than did the monolinguals in control. These results demonstrate, first, that the bilingual advantage is neither confounded with nor limited by socioeconomic and cultural factors and, second, that separable aspects of executive functioning are differentially affected by bilingualism. The bilingual advantage lies in control but not in visuospatial representational processes.

Working memory in multilingual children: is there a bilingual effect?

This research investigates whether early childhood bilingualism affects working memory performance in 6- to 8-year-olds, followed over a longitudinal period of 3 years. The study tests the hypothesis that bilinguals might exhibit more efficient working memory abilities than monolinguals, potentially via the opportunity a bilingual environment provides to train cognitive control by combating interference and intrusions from the non-target language. A total of 44 bilingual and monolingual children, matched on age, sex, and socioeconomic status, completed assessments of working memory (simple span and complex span tasks), fluid intelligence, and language (vocabulary and syntax). The data showed that the monolinguals performed significantly better on the language measures across the years, whereas no language group effect emerged on the working memory and fluid intelligence tasks after verbal abilities were considered. The study suggests that the need to manage several language systems in the bilingual mind has an impact on children's language skills while having little effects on the development of working memory.