La régulation des émotions par le coping chez les enfants et adolescents de sept à 16 ans placés à l’Aide sociale à l’enfance

Objective

The aim of this paper was to compare foster care and typical children's and adolescent's use of emotion regulation processes through coping. Developmental shifts in coping strategies were expected to change coping profiles during the transition from childhood to adolescence and enhance a less adaptive coping style in foster adolescents.

Methods and population

One hundred and forty-two children and adolescents, from 7 to 16 years, participated to this study, 46 were in foster care and 96 were in typical families. Most families lived on medium incomes with a low to medium educational attainment. An Hierarchical Classification Ascendant (method consisting to build a partition of the population into homogeneous clusters [low within-variability] which are different one from another [high between-variability]) was used to identify three coping profiles in children and adolescents: “flexible”, “avoidant”, and “active”. This method allowed us to set up children and adolescent profiles as a function of their ages, their social status and their gender.

Results

It was revealed that 30% of foster care children and adolescents used a “flexible” coping profile in the same proportion as in the control population. In both populations, there was an increase of the adaptive “flexible” coping profile with age. However, a placement in foster families after 6 years old increased adolescents’ vulnerability since between 12 and 16, they used less the “active” coping profile and more the “avoidant” coping style when faced with a stressor. The coping profiles of foster care girls differ significantly from those of girls in typical families with a greater proportion of “avoidant” coping profiles.

Conclusion

These results suggest that the transition from childhood to adolescence alters emotion regulation in both populations. They are discussed within the framework of clinical intervention following the resilience perspective.