Unfavorable family conditions as predictors of psychological trauma in senior school students

Abstract

Stressful events often happen to an individual in the family. Psychogenic diseases caused by material and domestic difficulties and conflicting family relationships occupy a significant place among mental disorders. Mental trauma disrupts the formation of schoolchildren’s communicative abilities and impacts their worldview on life prospects. Childhood trauma obviously increases the risk of many negative biopsychosocial processes as well as directly impacts the formation of personality. In most reviews and studies, neglect did not become a separate aspect of the analysis, except in isolated cases where neglect correlates with poverty rates. It is difficult to distinguish between deliberate neglect and failure to provide adequate care for children. Children may have psychologically traumatic experience as witnesses of abuse. The participants of the study in 2022–2023 were 96 schoolchildren in Saint Petersburg and Leningradsky Region aged 14–16 years. Of these, 51 were in socially disadvantaged family conditions according to the results of preliminary conversation with their teachers and school psychologists. The results of the study on students of the 9–11 year of study revealed that psychologically traumatic experience due to parental neglect contributes to the development of encapsulation with fixation on conflict in interpersonal relations. Comparative analysis showed that socially unfavorable conditions during early upbringing significantly increase the level of school distress and become predictors of maladaptation and decreased communicative abilities of senior school students. With increasing destructiveness of child-parent relationships, schoolchildren experience an increased desire to distance themselves from social contacts and a decrease in communicative interests, which complicates development of a mature worldview. Our study distinguishes between the impact of traumatic events and the minor’s reaction to these events. The adolescent has undeveloped opportunities to assess traumatic situations, the behavior of a significant adult, and the transformation of ideas about the surrounding world into a positively stable worldview system. In this context, encapsulation becomes a multidimensional and complex phenomenon — a predictor of psychological trauma of senior school students.