This paper focuses on the longitudinal relationships between foster children’s mental health problems and parental stress across a 1-year interval with three measurements. A sample of 94 foster children and a comparison group of 157 biological children and their families participated in this study. The age of the children was between 2 and 7 years. At the initial assessment, the foster children had been in their foster families since 2–24 months. Based on Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) scores, the results indicated increased internalizing and externalizing mental health problems in the foster children group. Both mental health scores remained rather stable across the longitudinal assessments in foster as well as in biological children. Internalizing as well as externalizing scores were substantially correlated with parental stress in both samples. Moreover, changes in mental health scores were associated with changes in parental stress. However, cross-lagged panel analyses showed no clear pattern of temporal relationships between children’s mental health scores and parental stress. Implications as well as strengths and limitations of the current study are addressed in the Discussion section.

中文翻译：

---

在寄养父母中，寄养儿童的心理健康问题与父母压力之间的纵向关系

本文重点研究了养育儿童的心理健康问题与父母压力在1年时间间隔内的纵向关系，采用了三种测量方法。94名寄养儿童的样本和157​​名亲生儿童及其家人的比较组参加了这项研究。孩子们的年龄在2至7岁之间。在初步评估中，寄养儿童自2-24个月以来一直在寄养家庭中。根据儿童行为清单（CBCL）分数，结果表明寄养儿童组内在和外在的心理健康问题有所增加。在纵向评估中，寄养儿童和亲生儿童的心理健康评分均保持相当稳定。内化和外化得分与两个样本中的父母压力基本相关。此外，心理健康评分的变化与父母压力的变化有关。但是，交叉滞后的小组分析表明，儿童的心理健康评分与父母压力之间的时间关系没有明确的模式。“讨论”部分讨论了本研究的含义以及优点和局限性。