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To understand how children adapt in the context of family emergency housing, and how aspects of measurement might obscure positive adaptation, we defined three specific goals for this study. First, we aimed to describe children’s mental health symptoms measured at two time points, 1 month apart during their stay in emergency housing. With well-validated measures of parent distress and child traumatic stress, internalizing problems, and externalizing problems, we expected to find improvements across the 1-month interval based on both child report and parent report. For our second goal, we were interested in comparing children’s self-reported and parent-reported traumatic stress symptoms in the context of parent distress, with the expectation that parents would conflate their own distress with their perceptions of children’s traumatic stress, leading to inaccurate reports particularly by the most distressed parents. Finally, we sought to predict mental health outcomes after one month from specific factors that vary across individuals and families: child cognitive functioning including general intelligence and executive functioning, and warmth expressed by parents regarding their children.