Research

Short video on co-regulation, the interactive process by which caring adults (1) provide warm supportive relationships, (2) promote self-regulation through coaching, modeling, and feedback, and (3) structure supportive environments.

Findings have implications for ways to successfully market home-based parenting programs to families experiencing risk factors for child maltreatment and engage them in evidence-based services to promote family well-being.

The Durham Navigation Study is a randomized control trial to evaluate the impact of Community Navigation on outcomes for young children and their families.

In the APA Handbook of Adolescent and Young Adult Development, Drew Rothenberg and co-authors focus on the parenting of adolescents and young adults in the United States. First considering some of the sociodemographic trends that are reshaping families, then examining classic social learning and behavioral approaches to conceptualizing the parenting of adolescents as well as family systems approaches.

In the APA Handbook of Adolescent and Young Adult Development, Jen Lansford and co-authors discuss how parents and their adolescent and young adult offspring observe and participate in parent–offspring interactions in their communities and hold expectations about their own relationships derived in part from culturally shaped expectations.

To reflect historical changes in family composition, gender roles and division of childcare, norms about the acceptability of different forms of discipline, and the digital environment in which children live, this report presents the HOME-21, a revised version of the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment–Short Form, which has been the most widely used measure of children’s home environments for decades.

CrowdScience listener Ilixo, age 11, has been wondering why it is that our parents become so annoying as we become teenagers. Is it something that is changing in his brain or are they actually becoming more annoying as they age? Presenter Marnie Chesterton consults our assembled panel of experts, including Jennifer Lansford, a Research Professor at Duke University who studies parenting and child development.

Parent and child endorsement of reactive aggression both predict the emergence of child aggression, but they are rarely studied together and in longitudinal contexts. The present study does so by examining the unique predictive effects of parent and child endorsement of reactive aggression at age 8 on child aggression at age 9 in 1456 children from 13 cultural groups in 9 nations.

This brief is part of a series to examine state-level policies that relate to social service and safety net programs and the ways in which state and federal policy implementation at the local level may affect the reach of program benefits among Latino families.

Lisa Gennetian and Anna Gassman-Pines’ chapter in The Cambridge Handbook of Parenting focuses on families with young children age 0-5 and considers the context of work and employment for parents, the role of child care and early education as supports for working parents, and the theoretical and empirical linkages between parents’ work contexts and parenting.

Jen Lansford’s chapter in The Cambridge Handbook of Parenting provides an overview of parents’ discipline and punishment in relation to child development.

Motivated by the rise in premature mortality among working-age adults, we examine the association between adult familial deaths and the transition to motherhood. Although many deaths can be disruptive, deaths that occur sooner than expected and to certain family members (e.g., mothers) may prompt changes in resources, time available for parenting, or psychological understandings in ways that change fertility behavior.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, workers not identifying as White non-Hispanic in our sample were more likely to get laid off than White workers. However, these workers were less likely than White workers to receive unemployment insurance at all. Among those who were laid off, these workers and White workers experienced similar increases in material and mental health difficulties and similar gains when they received unemployment insurance.

Scholars have focused on administrative burden or the costs of claiming public benefits. Learning, psychological, and compliance costs can discourage program participation and benefit redemption. Although policy changes during COVID-19 were poised to reduce compliance costs and ease conditions that create redemption costs in each program, the learning costs of policy changes prevented many program participants from experiencing the benefits of these policy transformations.

In Parenting and Child Development in Low- and Middle-Income Countries, Jennifer Lansford, Drew Rothenberg and Kirby Deater-Deckard’s chapter, Parent Discipline and Violence, National Development, and Early Childhood Development in 51 Low- and Middle-Income Countries, focuses on nonviolent discipline, psychological aggression, and physical violence in relation to specific domains of early childhood development.

In Parenting and Child Development in Low- and Middle-Income Countries, Drew Rothenberg and co-authors chapter, Predictors of Early Childhood Development, analyzes how the representations of different process, person, and context systems fare relative to one another in predicting the early childhood development outcomes

These findings provide evidence that net worth poverty has negative associations with children’s development. Net worth poverty predicts lower reading and applied problem scores and increased behavioral problems.

This study provides evidence that net worth poverty has negative associations with children’s development.

This study demonstrates that a universal approach to early family intervention can have positive population impact while also reducing disparities in outcomes.

Building on the ongoing Parenting Across Cultures longitudinal study that began in 2008, this project will continue to follow participants in their early to mid-twenties.

A key policy question in evaluating social programs to address childhood poverty is how families receiving unconditional financial support would spend those funds. Economists have limited empirical evidence on this topic in the U.S. We find that the cash transfers increased spending on child-specific goods and mothers’ early-learning activities with their infants.

The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly affected American families and children, including through the closure or change in the nature of their care and school settings. For all families, care or school disruptions were related to worse child behavior, more negative parental mood, and increased likelihood of losing temper and punishment.

Emeryville, California’s Fair Workweek Ordinance (FWO) aimed to reduce service workers’ schedule unpredictability by requiring large retail and food service employers to provide advanced notice of schedules and to compensate workers for last-minute schedule changes. The FWO decreased working parents’ schedule unpredictability and improved their well-being, decreased parents’ days worked while increasing hours per work day, and parent well-being improved.

This study examined whether the childhood intervention program called Fast Track improves family life into the second generation.

Longitudinal data from the Parenting Across Cultures study of children, mothers, and fathers in 12 cultural groups in nine countries were used to understand predictors of compliance with COVID-19 mitigation strategies and vaccine hesitancy. Findings suggest the importance of bolstering confidence in government responses to future human ecosystem disruptions, perhaps through consistent, clear, non-partisan messaging and transparency in acknowledging limitations and admitting mistakes to inspire compliance with government and public health recommendations.

This study provides an unprecedented opportunity to understand whether and how primals in early adulthood are predicted by childhood and adolescent experiences and how parents’ primals are related to their young adult children’s primals in the most diverse long-term longitudinal study ever conducted.

Researchers examine net worth by the intersection of gender, parental, and relationship status during a period of increasing wealth inequality and family diversification using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances from 1989 through 2019. Despite changing social selection into marriage and parenthood, married parents consistently held a wealth advantage over demographically similar adults in other household types.

Behavioral economics (BE) combines economics with social psychology and cognitive decision-making to offer a broader framework for understanding factors that affect people’s decisions and actions. It provides a way to examine how decisions can be shaped not only by information and costs but by how choices are designed, as well as the context and circumstances of the moment in which decisions are made.

What is Behavioral Economics A mother, let us call her Madison, intends to breastfeed her child exclusively for the first six months after consideration of the information she has read about the benefits to her and her child. After a few months, however, she adds formula even though breastfeeding has been going well and there…

This study investigated associations between COVID-19-related disruption and perception of increases in internalising symptoms among young adults and whether these associations were moderated by earlier measures of adolescent positivity and future orientation and parental psychological control.

In this paper, we analyze program activity for Family Connects (FC), an evidencebased postpartum home-visiting intervention, during the COVID-19 pandemic. When the pandemic began, FC transitioned to a virtual protocol which maintains key psychosocial components of the in-person protocol and adjusts health assessments to address the lack of in-person contact.

Early reports highlighted challenges in delivering home visiting programs virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic but the extent of the changes in program implementation and their implications remains unknown. We examine program activity and families’ perceptions of virtual home visiting during the first nine months of the pandemic using implementation data for Family Connects (FC), an evidence-based and MIECHV-eligible, postpartum nurse home visiting program.

Home visiting is a popular approach to improving the health and well-being of families with infants and young children in the United States; but, to date, no home visiting program has achieved population impact for families in rural communities. The current report includes evaluation results from the dissemination of a brief, universal postpartum home visiting program to four high-poverty rural counties.

Using a sample of 1338 families from 12 cultural groups in 9 nations, we examined whether retrospectively remembered Generation 1 (G1) parent rejecting behaviors were passed to Generation 2 (G2 parents), whether such intergenerational transmission led to higher Generation 3 (G3 child) externalizing and internalizing behavior at age 13, and whether such intergenerational transmission could be interrupted by parent participation in parenting programs or family income increases of > 5%.

Across countries, adolescents’ internalizing problems pre-pandemic predicted increased internalizing during the pandemic, and poorer well-being pre-pandemic predicted increased externalizing and substance use during the pandemic.

Historically, individualism vs. collectivism has been a main organizing framework for understanding cultural differences in family life. This study examines parents in nine countries to understand their individualism, collectivism and parenting attitudes. They found parenting attitudes are predicted by a range of sociodemographic factors.

This study capitalizes on a longitudinal, cross-national study of parenting, adolescent development, and young adult competence to document the association between personal disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic and reported changes in internalizing and externalizing behavior in young adults and their mothers since the pandemic began.

Baby’s First Years is a pathbreaking study of the causal impact of monthly, unconditional cash gifts to low-income mothers and their children in the first three years of the child’s life. The cash gifts are funded through charitable foundations. The study will identify whether reducing poverty can affect early childhood development and the family processes that support children’s development.

Early proficiency in math skills is increasingly being seen as an independent area worthy of early curriculum development and policy investment to reduce socioeconomic disparities in children’s school readiness.

Analyses were based on a 20+ year prospective, community-representative study of 1420 children, who were assessed up to 8 times during childhood (ages 9–16; 6674 observations) about access to guns in their home.

Wealth inequality—the unequal distribution of assets and debts across a population—has reached historic levels in the United States, particularly for households with children.

Many childhood interventions target low-income and high-risk children, with evidence that some early interventions improve adult health and wellbeing. This study asks whether children who benefit from early interventions grow up to become better parents and, subsequently, have children who experience fewer health problems, educational challenges, and emotional problems.

Using the most diverse, prospectively studied, multi-national sample to date, this study will generate empirical findings to develop a model of child- and family-level mediators and culture-level moderators of the role of childhood risk factors and young adult competence and maladaptation. Cross-cultural comparisons will inform domestic models of young adult maladaptation.

The National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families is a collaboration between Child Trends and three university based research partners and serves as a hub of research-based information on low-income Hispanic children and families.

Around 1,000 hourly service workers with young children in a large US city were sampled with an initial focus on work schedule unpredictability and worker and family well-being. The data collection then shifted with the emergence of COVID-19 to reflect pandemic-related concerns such as food insecurity, job loss, income, and access to pandemic-specific and broader social safety net policy supports.

Project Description This longitudinal study is a collaboration among Auburn University, Indiana University, and Duke University that investigates children’s social development and adjustment by following 585 children from two cohorts recruited in consecutive years, 1987 and 1988, from Nashville, Tenn.; Knoxville, Tenn.; and Bloomington, Ind. The children were recruited the year before they entered kindergarten; the…

Project Description The Durham Children’s Initiative (DCI) (formerly East Durham Children’s Initiative) is a place-based, nonprofit organization that supports children and families from cradle to college or career. Established in 2010, DCI’s vision is that all children in Durham graduate from high school ready for college or career. To achieve this vision, DCI provides children…

Project Description This effort will expand the operational capacity of the Guilford County Department of Public Health to implement the Family Connects model in support of Phase One of the Get Ready Guilford Initiative. Project Goals The overall goal of the Get Ready Guilford Initiative is to promote the health, development, and school readiness of…

Project Description Over the course of 18 months, Family Connects and Nurse-Family Partnership proposed to develop, field test, and implement an innovative approach to reaching and serving all pregnant women in three zip codes in Guilford County, NC. Project Goals Our goal is to have an impact on the entire population of women giving birth…

Project Description There is very limited cross-cultural evidence on the relationship among parenting practices, children’s emotions, children’s social behaviors, and children’s general well-being. I have teamed up with a young scholar, Dr. Laura DiGuinta, in Italy to examine how culture influences these factors. We collected data from 460 11- to 12-year-old children and their parents…

Project Description This project evaluated the School Based Child and Family Support Team (CFST) Initiative, which provides appropriate family-centered, strengths-based community services and supports to those children at risk of school failure or out-of-home placements as a result of physical, social, legal, emotional or developmental factors that affect their academic performance. Early results indicated that…

Project Description The harms of substance use and the specific public policies implemented for combating substance use are associated with societal costs estimated at over $500 billion annually in the U.S. alone. Prevailing debates on public policies for curbing substance use focus on the relative merits of employing a public health approach- awareness, prevention, and…

Project Description The Center partnered with the N.C. Division of Social Services, county-level departments of social services, other contractors and families for the project. Analysis of data from both the SOC and Multiple Response System (MRS) evaluations has shown that implementing MRS and SOC simultaneously not only enhanced the implementation of MRS, but also provided positive…

Project Description The Children’s Bureau awarded the Alamance County Department of Social Services (ACDSS) one of five national grants to demonstrate the use of Comprehensive Family Assessments (CFA) to improve child welfare outcomes. The Center for Child and Family Policy partnered with ACDSS to develop, implement, and evaluate an evidence-based model for conducting comprehensive family assessments,…

Project Description Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can have devastating effects on health and behavior. But many children avoid such dire outcomes, even thrive, despite exposures to multiple ACEs. It is not known, however, whether this individual resilience will be sustained into adulthood and transmitted to the next generation. This project brings together a longitudinal, community…

Project Description Although prevention scientists have documented effective interventions to prevent adult substance abuse, antisocial behavior, and risky sexual behavior, these interventions have not been applied to optimize return on investment and thus have not yet been fully embraced by communities. We propose mapping the relations between early risk profiles (and preventive intervention) and adult…

Project Description Child maltreatment is an important public health issue; exposure increases the risk of adverse health consequences including injury, substance use, obesity, depression, and death. The criminal justice system’s role in reducing such crimes is not well understood. Further, few studies examines whether Family Drug Treatment Courts prevent maltreatment. Project Goals This study has…

Project Description This study examined a socio-cultural conception of marriage and childbearing by combining qualitative and quantitative analyses to understand the roles of marriage and fertility in the lives of adolescents and young adults. Project Goals To understand socio-cultural conceptions of marriage and childbearing. Results indicated that marriage and fertility are regarded as two separate…

Project Description This study sought to examine day-to-day variability in the work experiences (work hours; workload; interpersonal interactions with supervisors and coworkers; perceptions of discrimination) of Mexican immigrant fathers with young children (age 3-5) and how those work experiences affect family functioning and child well-being. Mediating mechanisms linking paternal work experiences to child behavior were…

Project Description The Durham Family Initiative was a 12-year collaboration with the Center for Child and Family Health supported by the The Duke Endowment to improve family well-being and reduce child maltreatment in Durham County. The endeavor began by providing community-based efforts to help families support their children’s health, growth and development in stressed neighborhoods…

Purpose The Center for Child and Family Policy is partnering with the Center for Child and Family Health and ZERO TO THREE to develop a novel integration of Family Connects and HealthySteps in Guilford County, NC. Both are proven programs that improve outcomes for very young children. Goal The integration of the two programs promises to provide all children in…

Researcher Katie Rosanbalm served as a consultant/collaborator to the Wake County Public School System for this project, helping them with the planning phase for wide-scale implementation of the Triple P (positive parenting program) intervention within Wake County.

Project Description The Building Strong Families (BSF) project, a randomized control trial to enhance relationships among new parents, had few effects on the families involved. The treatment, which consisted of counseling, relationship skill training, and other family support services, had little impact on relationship outcomes, parenting measures, or child well-being. Three years after randomization, the…

Project Description There is a concerning lack of available mental health services for children aged zero to five with serious emotional disturbances and their families in Alamance County. Alamance County Department of Social Services, through this grant, is building such services within the framework of a comprehensive home- and community-based System of Care. Evaluation of…

Evaluation of a new labor law, the Fair Workweek Standard, which went into effect January 1, 2020 in Philadelphia.

Project Description Research Triangle scientists with demonstrated expertise in the pressing public health problem of child maltreatment planned to develop a multidisciplinary, product-oriented scholarly work group to address the causes, consequences, and prevention of child maltreatment. Project Goals The specific activities included: convening regular meetings to share research findings and to identify specific topics for…

Project Description The Doris Duke Fellowships for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect is designed to identify and develop a new generation of leaders capable of and interested in creating initiatives that will advance child abuse prevention practice and policy. Because the prevention of child maltreatment requires knowledge and collaboration from diverse fields, the…

Project Description There is very limited cross-cultural evidence on the relationship among parenting practices, children’s emotions, children’s social behaviors, and children’s general well-being. I have teamed up with a young scholar, Dr. Laura DiGuinta, in Italy to examine how culture influences these factors. We collected data from 460 11- to 12-year-old children and their parents…

Project Description The issue of so-called “on-call scheduling,” in which employers facing variable customer demand minimize labor costs by requiring workers to be available for work but not compensating them for their availability when not needed, is receiving national attention. Several localities have considered legislation to require large employers to commit to schedules with two…

Project Description This project aims to discern how early conduct disorder leads to substance-use problems; to understand processes of resilience to substance use development among conduct problem children; and to test the efficacy of a conduct disorder prevention program in preventing substance use problems in young adulthood. Project Aims To describe comorbidity, growth, and cross-temporal…

Project Description To examine how children’s experiences with household net worth poverty and income poverty influence their well-being as measured through cognitive and socio-emotional outcomes.  The sample of children aged 0-18 and their household characteristics will be constructed from existing Prospective Study of Child Development–Child Development Study (PSID-CDS) data.  Descriptive statistics and multivariate regression analyses…

Project Description Family Connects International is partnering with the University of North Carolina’s 4th Trimester Project to learn more about the postpartum experience. This work is part of a larger, federally funded project through the Health Resources and Service Administration to the state of North Carolina, called the Maternal Health Innovation program. Project Goals This…

The Prospective Study of Infant Development is a randomized control trial evaluation of the Family Connects program (formerly Durham Connects). In order to examine the ways in which family characteristics and community services are associated with family well-being, the Prospective Study of Infant Development interviewed families who had participated in Durham Connects on multiple aspects of family life, including parents’ opinions about parenting, child health and medical care, access and receipt of family services, and mothers’ well-being.

Project Description The Alamance County Health Department contracted with the Center for Child and Family Policy to conduct the external evaluation of Project LAUNCH, a demonstration project for the wellness of young children and the development of state- and locally-based networks for the coordination of key child-serving systems.  LAUNCH aimed to create a preventive system…

Project Description The Durham Integrated Domestic Violence Response System (DIDVRS) is a collaborative project that includes the Durham County Department of Social Services (DCDSS), the Durham Crisis Response Center (DCRC), the Durham Police Department (DPD), Durham County Emergency Medical Services (EMS), the Center for Child and Family Health (CCFH), Exchange Family Center (EFC), and the…

Project Description The Community Nonprofit Capacity-Building Project sought to support family-serving organizations in Durham by providing training, coaching, and technical assistance in areas such as policy engagement, evaluation, and evidence-based implementation. Project Goals This project, currently in the pilot phase, partnered with organizations to identify their needs and goals, match them with experts in these…

Project Description The GREAT Schools and Families Project – completed in 2007 – was a multi-site program to develop and evaluate violence prevention programs for middle school students. Researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and the University of Georgia-Athens collaborated on this project. The project was funded by the National Centers for…

Project Description The Duke University Fast Track Data Center provides all data files that are necessary to complete analyses to evaluate the impact of the Fast Track preventive intervention program, the factors that account for positive impact of the program, and processes in the development of healthy and problematic outcomes in high-risk youth. The study…

Project Description The Durham Children’s Data Center was established in January 2015. Initial partners include the Durham County Manager’s Office, the Durham Public Schools, the Durham Partnership for Children, and Duke University. Initial funding for the Data Center was provided by Duke University. The Center is housed and administered at the Center for Child and…

Project Description Policymakers fear that the gap in marriage between low- and high-income parents may exacerbate inequality by increasing disparities in children’s academic achievement. Whether it does, however, depends on whether marriage causes improved child outcomes or merely reflects other advantages. We revisit this question by identifying quasi-experimental variation in whether parents who conceive non-maritally…

Project Description Over the past decade, the United States has seen a marked increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities. We propose to analyze a potentially harmful, but unintended, consequence of such activities: its effects on the health and well-being of immigrant pregnant mothers and their children. We investigate the impacts of 287(g) programs…

Project Description This project analyzes economic inequality among families with children in the contemporary American landscape. Our goal is to ascertain whether family structure per se has become more important over time in explaining economic inequality, or whether it is the constellation of factors associated with family structure that have grown in importance. To achieve…

Project Description The Duke Endowment and the Say Yes to Education programs requested that the Center for Child and Family Policy conduct a Feasibility Study to determine whether a comprehensive information system can be engineered for their proposed Guilford Initiative. The information system will track every child living in Guilford County over time, pull in…

Project Description This three-year study set will evaluate four types of courts, general, driving while intoxicated (DWI), drug and hybrid drug. Drug treatment courts (DTC) represent a promising innovation for dealing with crimes committed by offenders who have an underlying addiction problem. Specialty courts combine standard deterrence efforts with treatment. Project Aims This study has…

Project Description The overall goal of this project is to develop an understanding of the effects of housing insecurity on families in Durham County and the conditions and policies that contribute to housing insecurity. We will work with our community partners to identify policies and services that influence the impact of housing insecurity in our community….

The Family Connects (FC) program, a community-wide nurse home visiting program for newborns, has been shown to provide benefits for children and families through the first 5 years of life.

Beth Gifford, Megan Golonka and Kelly Evans wrote a chapter of the book, Children with Incarceratead Mothers Separation, Loss, and Reunification. The chapter summarized findings of their study that examined the timing of mother’s incarceration in relation to her children’s involvement with social services, contributory factors leading to foster care placement, and foster care discharge outcomes.

Key Takeaways: Harsher immigration law enforcement by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement leads to decreased use of prenatal care for foreign-born mothers and declines in birth weight. The uptick in ICE activities under the Trump administration may have long-lasting, harmful effects on U.S.-born citizens. Sheriffs and local governments should terminate their 287(g) agreements with ICE…

Lower family income during childhood is related to increased rates of adolescent depression, though the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood.

Edited by Jennifer Lansford and Drew Rothenberg with Marc Bornstein, this book shares findings from a study of parents and children in China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand and the United States. Each chapter is authored by a contributor native to the country examined. Together, the chapters provide a global understanding of parenting across cultures.

We examine how increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities impacted newborn health and prenatal care utilization in North Carolina around the time Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act was first being implemented within the state.

Family science has long considered the ways in which parents’ experiences in the workplace can affect families.

Key Takeaways: Economic instability remains high among hourly service workers — from both job and household income loss. Food insecurity has increased significantly among working families. Safety net programs can help families maintain their incomes and reduce food insecurity, however benefits are not reaching everyone. Keeping vulnerable families afloat during the pandemic will require policymakers…

The Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy partnered with the Durham Crisis Response Center, the Exchange Family Center, the Center for Child and Family Health, and the Durham County Department of Social Services to create the Durham Integrated Domestic Violence Response System (DIDVRS). DIDVRS is an evidence-based, community-led approach to more appropriately address…

The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 has changed American society in ways that are difficult to capture in a timely manner.

Zika virus epidemics have potential large-scale population effects. Controlled studies of mice and nonhuman primates indicate that Zika affects fecundity, raising concerns about miscarriage in human populations.

Over the last five decades, dramatic social changes have disrupted established patterns of family life and human development in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. This book examines the role of these changes, such as urbanization, educational progress, emigration, and globalization, and describes their implications for Gulf families.

This brief provides an overview of the various channels through which COVID-19 has affected the lives of children and families, and proposes 4 key actions to help communities heal and build stronger, equitable systems: Create a “new” public health system centered upon a universal approach to care with a focus on equity. Invest in early…

This policy brief focuses on how necessary responses to the COVID-19 pandemic alter the health and social service landscape for children and families, particularly those who were already vulnerable, and offers policy guidance.

This brief provides an overview of key ways in which COVID-19 has impacted working families, as drawn from our study’s survey analysis. 1. Drastic Reductions in Work Hours and Increase in Job Loss 2. Harmed Well-Being of Both Parents and Their Children 3. Policy Supports Not Reaching Families 4. Employer-Provided Benefits Reaching Some Families

Using data from the American Time Use Survey, we examine the empirically underexplored ways in which racial and ethnic identity shapes parental time use.

Fire has long served as a tool in agriculture, but the practice’s link with economic activity has made its health consequences difficult to study.