113 results match your criteria: "Center on the Developing Child[Affiliation]"

Importance: Mental health disorders are increasing for children and adolescents in the US, with those in poverty having especially high rates. More evidence is needed about the association between economic policies, such as the minimum wage, and children's mental health.

Objective: To test the association between minimum wages and the mental health of children and adolescents.

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Neighborhood safety is defined inconsistently across epidemiologic studies - a conceptual problem that results in incomparable measurements, hampering the design of health interventions. Using child behavior problems (measured via the Child Behavior Checklist) as the outcome of interest, this study directly compared four measures of neighborhood safety: two of experienced safety and two of perceived safety, with each one measured at family and community levels. These included children's direct experience of harm, parental perceptions, community crime statistics, and community perceptions.

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Individual-Level Experiences of Structural Inequity and Their Association with Subjective and Objective Sleep Outcomes in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study.

J Adolesc Health

September 2024

Social and Behavioral Sciences Department, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Harvard University, Center on the Developing Child, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Purpose: Research has documented that adolescent sleep is impacted by various stressors, including interpersonal experiences and structural disadvantage. This study extends existing knowledge by empirically examining interconnected individual experiences of structural inequity and assessing its association with subjective and objective sleep outcomes.

Methods: We utilized data from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development Study to identify seven conceptual domains of structural inequity: perceived discrimination, low school inclusivity, neighborhood safety, unmet medical needs, legal problems, material hardship, and housing insecurity.

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Neighborhood Opportunity and Obesity in Early Adolescence: Differential Associations by Sex.

J Adolesc Health

August 2024

Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts; Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Purpose: Though research indicates that certain aspects of adverse neighborhood conditions may influence weight development in childhood and adolescence, it is unknown if the Child Opportunity Index (COI), a composite measure of 29 indicators of neighborhood conditions, is associated with weight outcomes in adolescence. We hypothesized that lower COI would be associated with higher overweight and obesity in cross-sectional and longitudinal modeling in a national sample of 9 year olds and 10 year olds and that this association would be different by sex.

Methods: Using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study (n = 11,857), we examined the cross-sectional association between COI quintile and overweight and obesity in 9 year olds and 10 year olds.

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The purpose of this study was to examine the prevalence, predictors, and consequences of disagreement between prospective caregiver and retrospective child reports of childhood physical and emotional maltreatment. The design was a secondary analysis of data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, a three-decade long UK-based birth cohort. Prospective caregiver reports were in poor to fair agreement with retrospective child reports for physical and emotional maltreatment exposure, with caregivers tending to underreport exposure.

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Concordance in Child-Parent Reporting of Social Victimization Experiences in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study.

Acad Pediatr

March 2024

Department of Health Policy and Management (K Choi), Fielding School of Public Health, UCLA, Los Angeles, Calif; School of Nursing (K Choi), UCLA, Los Angeles, Calif. Electronic address:

Objective: To investigate child-parent concordance in reporting social victimization experiences and whether parent concordance with child report of victimization was associated with child behavioral symptoms.

Methods: This was an observational study with data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Social Development (ABCD-SD) substudy. The analytic sample was 2415 pre-adolescent children from the United States.

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Purpose: There is widespread recognition of the importance and complexity of measuring neighborhood contexts within research on child psychopathology. In this study, we assessed the cross-sectional associations between two measures of neighborhood quality and internalizing and externalizing behaviors in preadolescence.

Methods: Drawing on baseline data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (n = 10,577 preadolescents), we examined two multi-component assessments of neighborhood quality in relation to children's internalizing and externalizing symptoms: the Area Deprivation Index (ADI), which measures socioeconomic adversity, and the Child Opportunity Index 2.

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Policy solutions to eliminate racial and ethnic child health disparities in the USA.

Lancet Child Adolesc Health

February 2024

Smith Child Health Outcomes, Research, and Evaluation Center, Stanley Manne Children's Research Institute, Ann & Robert H Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA; Department of Pediatrics, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL, USA; Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA.

Societal systems act individually and in combination to create and perpetuate structural racism through both policies and practices at the local, state, and federal levels, which, in turn, generate racial and ethnic health disparities. Both current and historical policy approaches across multiple sectors-including housing, employment, health insurance, immigration, and criminal legal-have the potential to affect child health equity. Such policies must be considered with a focus on structural racism to understand which have the potential to eliminate or at least attenuate disparities.

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Racial and ethnic inequities in the quality of paediatric care in the USA: a review of quantitative evidence.

Lancet Child Adolesc Health

February 2024

Milburn Smith Child Health Outcomes, Research, and Evaluation Center, Chicago, IL, USA; Department of Pediatrics, Chicago, IL, USA; Department of Pediatrics, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA.

Racial and ethnic inequities in paediatric care have received increased research attention over the past two decades, particularly in the past 5 years, alongside an increased societal focus on racism. In this Series paper, the first in a two-part Series focused on racism and child health in the USA, we summarise evidence on racial and ethnic inequities in the quality of paediatric care. We review studies published between Jan 1, 2017 and July 31, 2022, that are adjusted for or stratified by insurance status to account for group differences in access, and we exclude studies in which differences in access are probably driven by patient preferences or the appropriateness of intervention.

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Objectives: Racial and ethnic minority children receive less care and inferior care in the United States, but less is known about how these disparities vary by mental health conditions. We examined unmet mental health needs by condition types to identify potentially hidden racial and ethnic inequities.

Methods: We used data from the nationally representative National Survey of Children's Health, from 2016 to 2021 (n = 172 107).

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An understanding of child psychopathology and resilience requires attention to the nested and interconnected systems and contexts that shape children's experiences and health outcomes. In this study, we draw on data from the National Survey of Children's Health, 2016 to 2021 ( = 182,375 children, ages 3- to 17 years) to examine associations between community social capital and neighborhood resources and children's internalizing and externalizing problems, and whether these associations were moderated by experiences of racial discrimination. Study outcomes were caregiver-report of current internalizing and externalizing problems.

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Background: Although systemic inequities, broadly defined, are associated with health disparities in adults, there is a dearth of research linking contextual measures of exclusionary policies or prejudicial attitudes to health impairments in children, particularly among Latino populations. In this study, we examined a composite measure of systemic inequities in relation to the cooccurrence of multiple health problems in Latino children in the United States.

Methods: Participants included 17 855 Latino children aged 3 to 17 years from the National Survey of Children's Health (2016-2020).

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Importance: Childhood housing insecurity has dramatically increased in the US in recent decades, but whether an association with adverse mental health outcomes exists after adjusting for repeated measures of childhood poverty is unclear.

Objective: To test whether childhood housing insecurity is associated with later anxiety and depression symptoms after adjusting for time-varying measures of childhood poverty.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This prospective cohort study included individuals aged 9, 11, and 13 years at baseline from the Great Smoky Mountains Study in western North Carolina.

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Association between the timing of childhood adversity and epigenetic patterns across childhood and adolescence: findings from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) prospective cohort.

Lancet Child Adolesc Health

August 2023

Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit, Centre for Genomic Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA; Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA; Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA; Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, The Broad Institute of Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. Electronic address:

Article Synopsis
  • Childhood adversity affects DNA methylation patterns, potentially changing health outcomes throughout development, particularly during sensitive periods.
  • The study looked at data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, focusing on various types of childhood adversity and its impact on DNA methylation at age 15.
  • Using structured life course modeling, researchers evaluated how timing, accumulation, and recency of adversity influence adolescent DNA methylation and aimed to replicate findings with other studies.
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Childhood psychiatric symptoms are often diffuse but can coalesce into discrete mental illnesses during late adolescence. We leveraged polygenic scores (PGSs) to parse genomic risk for childhood symptoms and to uncover related neurodevelopmental mechanisms with transcriptomic and neuroimaging data. In independent samples (Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development, Generation R) a narrow cross-disorder neurodevelopmental PGS, reflecting risk for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, depression and Tourette syndrome, predicted psychiatric symptoms through early adolescence with greater sensitivity than broad cross-disorder PGSs reflecting shared risk across eight psychiatric disorders, the disorder-specific PGS individually or two other narrow cross-disorder (Compulsive, Mood-Psychotic) scores.

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Importance: Millions of rental evictions occur in the United States each year, disproportionately affecting households with children. Increasing attention has been paid to the impact of evictions on child health outcomes.

Objective: To synthesize and assess studies examining the associations of eviction exposure with infant and child health outcomes.

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Parent-child separation and cardiometabolic outcomes and risk factors in adulthood: A systematic review.

Psychoneuroendocrinology

June 2023

Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, USA; Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University, USA.

Background: Parent-child separation has been associated with negative mental health across childhood and adulthood, yet little is known about the long-term impacts for cardiovascular health. This systematic review synthesized and evaluated the quality of the literature examining the association between exposures to parent-child separation and cardiometabolic outcomes in adulthood.

Methods: Following a registered protocol, online databases (Pubmed, PsycInfo, and Web of Science) were searched for relevant studies.

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Neighborhood Opportunity and Mortality Among Children and Adults in Their Households.

Pediatrics

April 2023

The Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy, Brandeis University, Waltham Massachusetts.

Article Synopsis
  • Research indicates a connection between the neighborhood opportunity and health outcomes, specifically focusing on children's mortality risk and their caregivers over an 11-year period.
  • A study involving over 1 million children found that those living in low opportunity neighborhoods had significantly higher mortality risks, both for themselves and for their caregivers.
  • The findings highlight the negative effects of neighborhood inequalities on child well-being and suggest that addressing these disparities through targeted policies could improve health outcomes for children and their families.
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Residential instability during adolescence and health and wellbeing in adulthood: A longitudinal outcome-wide study.

Health Place

March 2023

Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA; Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.

Although prior research suggests that residential instability during adolescence can have long-term impacts on health and wellbeing, few studies have identified a robust comparison group and considered a broad set of outcomes. To address these knowledge gaps, we examined the associations between residential instability during adolescence and a wide range of adult health and wellbeing outcomes using an outcome-wide design in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. We defined residential instability as two or more moves between Waves I and II (ages 13-18 years).

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Background: Although investigations have begun to differentiate biological and neurobiological responses to a variety of adversities, studies considering both endocrine and immune function in the same datasets are limited.

Methods: Associations between proximal (family functioning, caregiver depression, and anxiety) and distal (SES-D; socioeconomic disadvantage) early-life adversities with salivary inflammatory biomarkers (IL-1β, IL-6, IL-8, and TNF-α) and hair HPA markers (cortisol, cortisone, and dehydroepiandrosterone) were examined in two samples of young U.S.

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Sensitive periods in development and risk for psychiatric disorders and related endpoints: a systematic review of child maltreatment findings.

Lancet Psychiatry

December 2022

Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit, Center for Genomic Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA; Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.

Variation in the mental health of people who have experienced childhood maltreatment is substantial. One hypothesis is that this variation is attributable, in part, to the timing of maltreatment-specifically, whether maltreatment occurs during sensitive periods in development when the brain is maximally sensitive to particular types of environmental input. To determine whether there is scientific consensus around when periods of peak sensitivity occur, we did a systematic review of human observational studies.

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Maternal stress and development of infant attention to threat-related facial expressions.

Dev Psychobiol

November 2022

Department of Pediatrics, Division of Developmental Medicine, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Attentional biases to threat-related stimuli, such as fearful and angry facial expressions, are important to survival and emerge early in development. Infants demonstrate an attentional bias to fearful facial expressions by 5-7 months of age and an attentional bias toward anger by 3 years of age that are modulated by experiential factors. In a longitudinal study of 87 mother-infant dyads from families predominantly experiencing low income, we examined whether maternal stress and depressive symptoms were associated with trajectories of attentional biases to threat, assessed during an attention disengagement eye-tracking task when infants were 6-, 9-, and 12-month old.

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Raising the bar for measuring childhood adversity.

Lancet Child Adolesc Health

February 2023

Department of Pediatrics, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 021144, USA; Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 021144, USA; Center for Genomic Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA 021144, USA; Harvard Center on the Developing Child, Cambridge, MA, USA. Electronic address:

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