Adverse childhood experiences in offspring living with parental mental illness: a controlled study from China

Abstract

Background

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) affect children’s development, and their harm to health is pervasive throughout the life course.

Aims

To identify ACEs and their risk factors in Chinese household with or without parental mental illness.

Methods

A controlled study was conducted among 181 young adults with parental mental illness (positive group) and 201 demographically matched individuals without parental mental illness (negative group). Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed to study the correlation between ACEs and their risk factors.

Results

The positive group suffered emotional abuse, domestic violence, bullying, and cumulative ACEs more frequently than the negative group. In the positive group, living in rural areas and having a low household economic status during childhood were identified as risk factors for cumulative ACEs, whereas a higher education level of the mother was a protective factor for cumulative ACEs in univariate analyses. Low household economic status remained an independent risk factor for cumulative ACEs in the positive group in multivariate analyses.

Conclusions

Children living with parental mental illness are more vulnerable to ACEs, and our findings highlight the importance of socioeconomic factors in increasing the risk of ACEs. To alleviate the deleterious impact of parental mental illness on offspring, multidimensional supports are needed.

Keywords:

• Adverse childhood experiences
• parental mental illness
• risk factors
• socioeconomic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by fundings from China Medical Board (OC 21-435) and Key Program of Beijing Science and Technology Commission (Z191100006619113) to LG.