Family relationships influence child development from infancy to adulthood. CCFP researchers examine how biological, cultural and familial processes, practices, and characteristics impact child and youth development both in the US and around the world. Our teams also develop programs and services and work to affect systems change to ensure that families and parents have the supports they need to provide safe, stable, nurturing relationships for their children.
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.
“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.
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 Durham Navigation Study is a randomized control trial to evaluate the impact of Community Navigation on outcomes for young children and their families.
learn more about Durham Navigation StudyBuilding 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.
learn more about Childhood, Adolescence, and Covid-Related Risk and Protective Factors in the Development of Adjustment in Early Adulthood Across CulturesThis 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.
learn more about Child and Adolescent Predictors of Young Adults’ and Their Parents’ Primals in Nine CountriesThe Henderson-Polk Family Life Survey is an impact evaluation of the Family Connects home visiting program, when delivered using a hybrid telehealth model.
learn more about Henderson-Polk Family Life SurveyShort 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.
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.