Conducted a study to determine whether the House-Tree-Person Test might be used as a means to identify physically abused children. Protocols of 32 abused children, 32 nonabused but disturbed children, and 45 apparently very well-adjusted children were examined for the presence of 15 objectively scorable items that emerged as good potential discriminators from a pilot study of 60 children. Resul...

Although many studies have investigated links between maternal employment and children's wellbeing, less research has considered whether the stability of maternal employment is linked with child outcomes. Using unique employment calendar data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 2,011), an urban birth cohort study of largely low-income families, this paper investigates wheth...

OBJECTIVE The goal was to determine the relationship between the 4 parenting styles (authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and neglectful) and overweight status in first grade. METHODS Data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development were analyzed. Children with complete data for parenting parameters at 54 months and me...

The nonprofit, nonpartisan Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy strongly supports the new HHS Home Visiting program, which incorporates key evidence-based approaches that we have promoted through our work with Congressional and Executive Branch policy officials. The program – whose total funding over FY 2010-2014 is $1.5 billion – awards grants to states to implement early childhood home visitin...

OBJECTIVE This article examines ethnic similarities and differences in profiles of mother-child interaction qualities for low-income African American and Latin American mothers and associations with preschoolers' emerging school readiness. DESIGN Videotaped mother-child interactions were collected at age 2.5 years from a sample of African American (n = 192) and Latin American (n = 210) famili...

Over 50% of mothers in rural Mexico have high depressive symptoms, and their children's health and development are likely to be negatively affected. A critical question is whether children vary in their vulnerability to the effects of high maternal depressive symptoms according to their indigenous ethnicity, maternal education, or household wealth. Our sample included 4442 mothers and 5503 chil...

Due to increased multiculturalism in the US and abroad, there is a need for increased understanding of the different ways in which parenting stress is related to child problems across cultures. In the present study, we investigated (a) differences in reported parenting stress and childhood problem behaviors across a Korean (n = 71) and US (n = 71) sample, as well as (b) differences in the ways ...

A number of studies have found that specific parent behaviors are strong predictors of child medical procedural distress or coping. These findings have informed treatment protocols to lower children's distress during invasive medical events. However, the vast majority of this research has been conducted on predominately North American, English-speaking, Caucasian samples. One growing population...

Over time, developmental theories and empirical studies have gradually started to adopt a bidirectional viewpoint. The area of intervention research is, however, lagging behind in this respect. This longitudinal study examined whether bidirectional associations between (changes in) parenting and (changes in) aggressive child behavior over time differed in three conditions: a child intervention ...