Coping with Some Adverse Events During Childhood Protects Health

OBJECTIVE: Most research on the impact of childhood distress within family focuses on the pathological damage caused to the distressed child. While the pathogenic paradigm focuses on why and how illness occurs, the salutogenic paradigm focuses on the origins and development of health. This communication, based on a salutogenic approach, will attempt to show that having had to cope with death of the father or the mother or separation of parents in the early stages of life increases an individual's capacity to remain in good health when faced with stressful events. METHOD: The analysis is based on 2002 French Health and Health Care Survey, carried out by INSEE, the Institute of Statistic and Economic Studies. Several series of reduced-form logit models based on a representative sample of 24,900 French individuals are used to estimate probabilities of having accidents and of being ill with different back-ground situations. Several childhood (before 18 years old) events are distinguished: death of the father (6.6%) or the mother (3.1%), separation of parents (9.1%), experience of conflict between the parents (12.4%), serious illness of the father (11.6%) or the mother (6.9%). RESULTS: The analysis revealed two different relationships between childhood events and health. On one hand, higher probabilities of having accidents and of being ill are associated with having experienced in the earlier stages of life a lack of affection, parental conflicts or serious illness of one of them. The more negative events experienced, the greater the probability of being sick or of having a grave accident. On the other hand, having had to cope with the death of one's mother or father, or with the separation of the parental couple, decreases the probability of being sick or of having a serious accident. Furthermore, we have found that these three types of events decreases the probability of tobacco and alcohol consumption in adulthood. This evidence support the assumption of a learning effect which increases the individual's risk aversion. CONCLUSIONS: The findings support a salutogenic approach in studying the health of adults who had distressed childhood. Implications on the possible detection of the coping resources of afflicted children that may contribute to resilience are discussed