Childhood adversities and later economic hardship among Swedish child welfare clients: Cumulative disadvantage or disadvantage saturation?

Abstract

National register data were used in a longitudinal design to test two competing hypotheses regarding links between cumulative exposure to childhood adversities and later adverse outcomes, conceptualised as economic hardship in early adulthood, among more than 11,000 Swedish youths who had received the same in-home child welfare intervention at ages two to five or at ages ten to thirteen. The cumulative-disadvantage perspective argues that the accumulation of childhood adversities increase the likelihood of negative outcomes later in life. In contrast, the disadvantage-saturation perspective suggests that the accumulation of childhood adversities is less consequential for initially disadvantaged individuals. Results from logistic regression analyses showed a pronounced positive association between the accumulation of childhood adversities and economic hardship (measured as extensive means-tested social assistance recipiency) in early adulthood. After adjustments for socio-economic confounders, the analyses showed that youth exposed to four or more childhood adversities during childhood had two- to four-fold elevated odds of receiving extensive social assistance compared to peers who had received the same intervention, but had no indications of exposure to childhood adversities. The results lend support to the relevance of accumulated childhood adversities for understanding long-term outcomes in child welfare populations.