This proposal is for a competing continuation of the Providence Family Study (PFS) to complete the first waves of longitudinal assessment on offspring of mothers who have been treated for affective and anxiety disorders. These children were originally recruited when they were 1 year or 2-1/2 years of age and followed every 1-1/2 years until they were 4 years of age. All children will have an assessment at 4 years of age by the end of the proposed project period. The orientation of this project is developmental, contextual, and transactional. The developmental approach is directed at delineating pathways by which perturbations in infant behavior are maintained or transformed as the child moves into early childhood and school age. The contextual approach is directed at identifying factors in the child's experience of the social environment that exacerbate or ameliorate atypical patterns of behavior. The transactional approach is directed at identifying patterns across time in which changes in child behavior may reciprocally affect parental, marital, or family functioning.
The aims of this project are (1) to complete the longitudinal assessment of the interrelations among child competence and mental health, family functioning, and social risk and protective factors during infancy and early childhood; (2) to perform a hierarchical analysis of environmental risk and protective factors at levels more or less proximal to the child to determine the relative contributions to mental health of variables at the parent, family, and social context levels; (3) to perform longitudinal analyses of the processes by which specific environmental risks interact with specific child factors to increase or decrease the quantity of behavioral problems from infancy to school age; and (4) to maintain contact with study families after children reach 4 years of age and to continue low-cost assessments of maternal course of illness and child behavior problems, which will facilitate potential follow-up assessments of the study children during the school years. Hypotheses examined are (1) risk from parents with psychopathology will affect the child, reducing levels of developmental competence in the domains of mental health (general social-emotional adjustment), social interaction with family, and individual competence; (2) risk from family dysfunction and discord will be associated with lower levels of child competence; (3) risk from multiple contextual factors will add additional variance in the explanation of child outcomes; and (4) protection from certain child and family characteristics will moderate the effects of risk in these children.
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