Relationships between psychosocial risks and stress in homeless children

Homeless children are typically exposed to the worst environmental conditio ,ls associated with poverty. Despite recent attention to psychosocial risks associated with homelessness, limited attention has been paid to stress-re lated symptoms in homeless children. Better understand,of homeless children 's experience of stress could point the way toward improvement of services for them. The purpose of the present exploratory study was to assess associ ations between child psychosocial risk factors and emotional and behavioral symptoms of stress in homeless children. Twenty-two homeless mothers of 29 children between the ages of 2 and 10 were sun,eyed about known psychosoci al risks for homeless children and completed the Pediatric Emotional Distre ss Scale (PEDS), a 17-item measure of stress-related symptoms in children. Findings suggest that the stress-related symptoms of these children are rel ated to the cumulative effects of environmental risk factors. The PEDS appe ars to be a sensitive measure of stress in children, and its brevity provid es an advantage in assessments in high-stress situations, More developmenta l work with low-SES samples, however is recommended.