Research

Findings from this study suggest that, among families experiencing low economic resources, maternal reports of stress are associated with differences in patterns of infant resting brain activity during the first year of life.

COVID-19 has led to a child care workforce and mental health crisis for staff, families, and children under age three (infants and toddlers). The current level of stress for chil­dren, families, and infant-toddler early care and education professionals and its impact on infant and toddler well-being needs our attention.

Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) minimizes recall burden and maximizes ecological validity and has emerged as a valuable tool. However, EMA has yet to be reliably utilized in young children. The present study evaluates the performance of a developmentally appropriate EMA smartphone app for young children ages 4–10.

A family cash transfer in childhood that had long-term effects on individual functioning did not impact the home environment of participants who became parents. Rather, parents in both groups were providing home environments generally conducive to their children’s growth and development.

Using data from surveys of Italian adolescents, researchers looked at the pattern of adolescent coping from just before the pandemic started and then for two more years. As adolescents reported feeling more stress about the pandemic, they reported more symptoms of anxiety and depression, and reported feeling less capable of coping with negative emotions. The findings are important for informing interventions to strengthen coping strategies for adolescents during stressful community-wide events.

The use of online questionnaires for research purposes has proliferated in recent years. However, many researchers undertake online survey research without knowledge of the prevalence and likelihood of experiencing survey questionnaire fraud nor familiarity with measures used to identify fraud once it has occurred. We offer lessons learned to illustrate the sophisticated nature of fraud in online research and the importance of multi-pronged strategies to detect and limit online survey questionnaire fraud.

COVID-19 has altered adolescents’ opportunities for developing and strengthening interpersonal skills and proficiencies. Using data from adolescents in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom, we examined the relation between internalizing symptoms assessed pre-pandemic or when pandemic-related restrictions were lifted and associated internalizing symptoms during a subsequent restrictive pandemic period.

Researchers studying predictors of adolescents’ adjustment have increasingly focused on temperamental characteristics of self-regulation (e.g., effortful control – EC) and negative emotionality (NE). This study contributed to understanding how different configurations of specific dimensions of NE and EC were associated with aggressive and prosocial behaviors and if these associations differed across genders and three different countries, two of which have seldom been examined.

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred an economic downturn that may have eroded population mental health, especially for renters and homeowners at risk of housing loss. Findings show that individuals who reported difficulty keeping up with rent or mortgage had increased anxiety and depression risks but that state eviction/foreclosure bans weakened these associations.

African American students often encounter racial microaggressions when attending predominantly white institutions (PWIs). Experiencing racial microaggressions can negatively affect African American students’ feelings of belonging to the campus community. Racial microaggressions can also affect students’ physical and emotional stability.

Estimates indicate that a child’s exposure to higher NC Pre-K funding was positively associated with that child’s academic achievement 6 years later. NC Pre-K funding effects on achievement were positive for all subgroups tested, and statistically significant for most.

Article reviews what racial microaggressions are, the impact of microaggressions on african-americans students, and research-based recommendations to address racial microaggressions in educational settings.

Researchers examined whether kindergarten conduct problems among mostly population-representative samples of children were associated with increased criminal and related costs across adolescence and adulthood, as well as government and medical services costs in adulthood.

“Backpack” food programs administered through public schools send non-perishable foods home with children to supplement school meals. Power Packs Project (PPP) is a unique backpack program, in that it provides fresh food. This study is the first to examine the effect of picking up a Power Pack in a given week on parent and child food insecurity and meal routines.

Findings provide the strongest evidence to date that very short birth spacing of zero through 6 months from last birth to the index child’s conception is a prenatal predictor of child maltreatment (indexed as child welfare involvement) throughout early childhood. However, challenging previous empirical evidence, this study reports inconsistent results for benefits of additional spacing delay beyond 6 months with regard to child maltreatment risk reduction, especially for children of racial and ethnic minorities.

This study demonstrates how data- and theory-driven methods can be integrated to identify the most important preadolescent risk factors in predicting adolescent mental health.

Food insecurity among adolescents is not static but varies from day to day. This daily variation is greater for economically disadvantaged youth.

Assignment to Family Connects, a short-term home visiting program, was associated with improvements in population-level self-reported scores of positive parenting 2 years post-intervention.

The authors performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of the impact of ACE exposure on Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) levels – a neural biomarker involved in childhood and adult neurogenesis and long-term memory formation.

Current findings build support for the effectiveness of TCIT-U as universal prevention of behavior problems with an ethnically and racially diverse sample of teachers and children, including children with developmental disabilities.

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.

Research characterizes public assistance programs as stigmatizing and stressful (e.g., psychological costs) but obscures differences across programs or the features of policy design that contribute to varied bureaucratic encounters.

This study broadens the traditional focus on income as the primary measure of economic deprivation by providing the first analysis of wealth deprivation, or net worth poverty (NWP), and adult health.

Although there is a breadth of knowledge on child marriage in many low- and middle-income countries, little research and policy discussion exists surrounding child marriage within the United States. Using administrative data from several sources, this study examines how a range of different state-level variables, including political lean, academic performance, median household income, religiosity, population density, minimum age requirements and other state laws, such as parental and judicial consent, and median distance to an abortion clinic are related to variation in child marriage rates across states.

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.

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.

In this study, researchers found that states’ granting of drivers’ licenses to undocumented people, availability of government information in Spanish, and employer mandates to inform employees were associated with higher EITC receipt among Hispanic families. These findings showcase ways in which information and outreach at the state level can support the equitable receipt of tax refunds and similar types of benefits distributed through the tax system.

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.

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.

This article presents data on the positive association of having a child maltreatment evaluation with subsequent acute health care utilization among children from birth to age three.

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.

Child abuse and neglect medical experts provide care to children when there is concern for maltreatment. Their clinical notes contain valuable information. This article includes the results of creating and implemented a coding system for data abstraction from these notes.

This article examines the impact on student absenteeism of a large, school-based community crime monitoring program that employed local community members to monitor and report crime on designated city blocks during times when students traveled to and from school. The authors find that the program resulted in a 0.58 percentage point (8.5 percent) reduction in the elementary school-level absence rate in the years following initial implementation.

The author investigates the effects of a multiyear program, StudentU, on the early high school outcomes of participating students by exploiting data from oversubscribed admissions lotteries. Results suggest that comprehensive services delivered outside of the regular school day have the potential to improve the educational outcomes of disadvantaged students.

The prevalence of arrests for crimes involving guns among young adults in North Carolina with a gun-disqualifying felony record acquired before age 18 suggests that the federal gun prohibitor conferred by a felony record is not highly effective as currently implemented in this population. From a risk-based perspective, these restrictions appear to be justified; better implementation and enforcement may improve their effectiveness.

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.

This paper analyzed how housing, neighborhood, and health insurance explain disparities in case positivity between and within racial-ethnic groups in Durham County, North Carolina, finding that housing, neighborhood, and health insurance had a significant role in producing racial-ethnic disparities in COVID-19 case positivity.

Economic theory suggests that crime should respond to punishment severity. Using increases in punishment severity in drug-free school zones along with changes in the probability of detection resulting from a community crime-monitoring program, we demonstrate that drug-related crime drops in blocks just within the drug-free school zones, where punishments are more severe, but only if the monitoring intensity–and hence the probability of detection–is at intermediate levels.

This study examined whether a key set of adolescent and early adulthood risk factors predicts problematic alcohol, cannabis, and other substance use in established adulthood. Externalizing behaviors and prior substance use in early adulthood were consistent predictors of problematic alcohol and cannabis misuse in established adulthood across samples.

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.

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.

Juvenile justice involvement was associated with increased risk of adult criminality, with residential services associated with highest risk. Juvenile justice involvement may catalyze rather than deter from adult offending.

In this paper the authors study the effects of three large, nearly-simultaneous coal-fired power plant closures on school absences in Chicago. They find that the closures resulted in a 6 percent reduction in absenteeism in nearby schools relative to those farther away following the closures.

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.

We conducted a scoping literature review and key informant interviews of child maltreatment experts to (1) document the existing research evidence on the performance of EHR-based child abuse screens (EHR-CA-S) and clinical decision support systems (EHR-CA-CDSS )and (2) examine clinical perspectives regarding the use of such tools and factors that affect uptake. We find that current evidence does not support adoption of a particular CA-S or CA-CDSS and that further refinement of these tools is necessary.

Data from the Baby’s First Years study, a randomized control trial, show that a predictable, monthly unconditional cash transfer given to low-income families may have a causal impact on infant brain activity.

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.

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on alcohol and illicit substance use among adults without children, parents, and adolescents was investigated through two studies with five samples from independent ongoing U.S. longitudinal studies.

Many young people were hesitant to reach out to formal systems in the future, in part because of negative experiences during past disclosure experiences. Young people may be more likely to seek support through their preferred communication medium, so providing text- and chat-based communication may be one way to encourage and facilitate disclosure.

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.

This paper investigates economic and psychological hardship during the COVID-19 pandemic among a diverse sample of socioeconomically disadvantaged parents and their elementary school-aged children. Longitudinal models revealed that food insecurity, negative parent and child mood, and child misbehavior significantly increased when schools closed; only food insecurity and parent depression later decreased.

This study evaluated how individuals’ own substance use and their perception of peers’ substance use predict each other across development from early adolescence to middle adulthood.

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.

Studies identify one element of compliance costs—quarterly appointments—as a barrier to continued WIC participation. This article draws on 44 in-depth qualitative interviews with participants in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) to examine how WIC participants perceived the reduction of compliance costs following the implementation of remote appointments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. WIC participants reported satisfaction with remote appointments and a reduction in the compliance costs of accessing and maintaining benefits.

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.

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.

Women face unique logistical and financial barriers to health care access.

This article investigates the effects of coal-fired power plant closures on zip code–level rates of emergency department visits for asthma-related conditions among 0- to 4-year-old children in Chicago, Illinois. Findings demonstrate that closing coal-fired power plants can lead to improvements in the respiratory health of young children.

Scholars have examined how administrative burden creates barriers to accessing public benefits but have primarily focused on the challenges of claiming benefits. Less is known about the difficulties beneficiaries face when using public benefits, especially voucher-based public assistance programs. Examining redemption costs can help clarify when and where beneficiaries experience burdens, reasons behind discontinuity in program participation, and why public programs fail to meet objectives.

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

Clearance rates for nonfatal shootings, especially cases involving gang- and drug-related violence, are disturbingly low in many US cities.

While we expected to find that Hispanic families may be disadvantaged by decentralized service delivery in a manner that is similar to the experiences of African American families, workers instead note significant resources that help facilitate Hispanic families’ access to programs.

This article examines the influence of teacher assistants and other personnel on outcomes for elementary school students during a period of recession-induced cutbacks in teacher assistants.

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.

Nationwide, school principals are given wide discretion to use disciplinary tools like suspension and expulsion to create a safe learning environment.

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

Just one in ten nonfatal shootings in Chicago lead to an arrest.

Using detailed administrative data for public schools, we document racial and ethnic segregation at the classroom level in North Carolina, a state that has experienced a sharp increase in Hispanic enrollment.

This study is the first to examine net worth poverty, and its intersection with income poverty, by race and ethnicity among child households in the United States.

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.

Parents charged with a criminal offense had higher rates of having a child protective services (CPS) assessment/investigation during the three years preceding the charge than parents who were not charged. Changing parental incarceration rates would change CPS caseloads substantially.

Based on growing evidence of the long-term benefits of enriched early childhood experiences, we evaluate the potential for addressing gender disparities in elementary school through early care and education programs.

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.

Charles T. Clotfelter, Steven W. Hemelt, Helen F. Ladd Education Finance and Policy (2019) 14 (3): 492–521. https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00258

Policy feedback scholarship has focused on how laws and their implementation affect either organizations (e.g., their resources, priorities, political opportunities, or incentive structures) or individuals (e.g., their civic skills and resources or their psychological orientations toward the state).

Policy makers, practitioners, and researchers have emphasized the importance of supportive relationships between staff and parents in early childhood education settings and schools.

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program is an important intervention for prevention and treatment of obesity and food insecurity, but participation has dropped among eligible populations from 2009 to 2015.

The purpose of this pilot study was to evaluate the potential of an innovative high school neuroscience-based health course for implementation feasibility and impact on student outcomes.

Saint-Eloi Cadely et al. found longitudinal patterns for the perpetration of both psychological and physical intimate partner violence (IPV), including actively and minimally aggressive patterns.

Using a randomized controlled trial, we tested a new teacher professional development program for increasing the language and literacy skills of young Latino English learners with 45 teachers and 105 students in 12 elementary schools.

We study the evolution of a campus-based aid program for low-income students that began with grant-heavy financial aid and later added a suite of nonfinancial supports.

North Carolina’s Smart Start and More at Four (MAF) early childhood programs were evaluated through the end of elementary school (age 11) by estimating the impact of state funding allocations to programs in each of 100 counties across 13 consecutive years on outcomes for all children in each county-year group (n = 1,004,571; 49% female; 61% non-Latinx White, 30% African American, 4% Latinx, 5% other).

Many advocacy organizations devote time and resources to increasing community awareness and educating the public in an effort to gain support for their issue.

This study examines the community-wide effects of investments in two early childhood initiatives in North Carolina (Smart Start and More at Four) on the likelihood of a student being placed into special education.