The aim of this proposal is to elucidate the familial and extra-familial factors that influence the well-being of children (and their parents) during two developmental periods -- the early childhood years and the early elementary school years. Of particular interest is understanding how familial and extra-familial factors interact with poverty and household structure (single parent, father present, other adult present), and maternal employment to produce child and parent outcomes. Child well-being encompasses four domains -- social, emotional, cognitive, and health. Six data sets will be used. They are the Infant Health and Development Program, the Children of the NLSY, the Baltimore Study of Young Mothers, Toddlers, and Grandmothers, the NICHD Child Care Consortium, the Teenage Parent Demonstration, the School Outcomes of Low birth Weight and Normal Birth Weight Children. All are longitudinal and assess children over time during preschool. Four follow children into the elementary school years. While only one is a nationally representative sample, the rest are multi-site studies with relatively large samples (i.e., over 1000 families). Poor and minority children are represented in all data sets. A general conceptual model is described in order to examine associations among several sets of factors known to influence child well-being. These sets include two focusing on background characteristics (family of origin and initial child characteristics), parental resources (income, household composition, parental employment and education), familial processes (family climate, parental social, emotional, and cognitive characteristics, parenting practices, and parental beliefs and attitudes), and extra-familial characteristics (child care, early childhood medical, educational and social services, and neighborhood resources). (1) The first set of questions look at the ways in which parental resources (with a special focus on poverty, maternal employment, and household structure) are associated with child outcomes. Several dimensions of parental resources will be examined, including timing, intensity, change, and threshold effects. Parental resources-child well- being links are examine in different subgroups defined by ethnicity, age of child, maternal education, maternal health, child status (i.e., gender, birth weight, neonatal illness, and, in some data sets, infant temperament). (2) The second question focuses on the pathways through which associations between parental resources and child well-being operate. Of particular interest are measures of family climate, neighborhood residence, child care choices, and parenting practices. Mediated models will be developed to elucidate some of the ways that poverty, for example, might result in decrements in well-being. (3) The third question is more specific, focusing on parenting practices, given that four of the studies include some observational data on parents and children. Our goal is to identify comparable parenting constructs across data sets, to see how congruent results are using the in-depth videotape data as opposed to the home rating systems, to chart the antecedents of maladaptive parenting, and to explore how child characteristics influence parenting (bi-directional effects). (4) The fourth issue focuses on the effects of early interventions upon child and family well-being. Programs that provide early educational and family support services as well as those that focus on job training, child care referral, and entry into the workforce will be examined vis-a-vis child and family outcomes.
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