The results support the need for comprehensive prevention and early intervention efforts with high-risk children, such that there does not appear to be a point beyond which services for children are hopeless, and that every risk factor we can reduce matters.

In the interest of improving child maltreatment prevention, this prospective, longitudinal, community-based study of 499 mothers and their infants examined (a) direct associations between mothers' experiences of childhood maltreatment and their offspring's maltreatment, and (b) mothers' mental health problems, social isolation, and social information processing patterns (hostile attributions and aggressive response biases) as mediators of these associations. Mothers' childhood physical abuse -but not neglect -directly predicted offspring victimization. This association was mediated by mothers' social isolation and aggressive response biases. Findings are discussed in terms of specific implications for child maltreatment prevention.Child maltreatment is a serious public health problem, most urgently for infants and toddlers. In the United States in 2006, 905,000 children, more than 12 of every 1,000 (1.2%) were identified as victims of abuse or neglect (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [US DHHS], 2008). Victimization rates among children between birth and age 1 were twice as high (2.4%). Female parents (typically biological mothers), acting alone or with another, perpetrated 64% of child abuse and neglect cases (US DHHS, 2008). The most common pattern of maltreatment (40% of cases) was a child victimized by a female parent acting alone.Child maltreatment not only results in acute physical injuries but also predicts later substance use problems (Kunitz et al., 1998), high-risk sexual behaviors (McCauley et al., 1997;Parillo et al., 2001), aggression and violent crime (Lansford et al., 2007), mental health problems (Cohen, Brown, & Smailes, 2001; Edwards, Holden, Felitti, & Anda, 2003;Widom, DuMont, & Czaja, 2007), and adult relationship problems, including intimate partner violence (Kunitz et al., 1998;Widom, Czaja, & Dutton, 2008). A history of child abuse has been identified as the strongest life-experience predictor of multi-problem behavior in adolescence (Lansford et al., 2002). The earlier in a child's life that maltreatment occurs, the more likely it is to recur, and the greater the physical, psychological, and social costs (Cicchetti & Toth, 1995;Keiley, Howe, Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 2001; US DHHS, 2008).Rigorous developmental science can be brought to bear on the pernicious problem of child maltreatment by examining developmental processes that may underlie the associations between well-documented risk factors and child victimization. In the interest of identifying proximal intervention targets for child maltreatment prevention, this prospective longitudinal study examines (a) mothers' history of childhood maltreatment (physical abuse or neglect) as a risk factor for their child's maltreatment during infancy and toddlerhood, Intergenerational Continuity in the Experience of Child MaltreatmentChild maltreatment is widely viewed as multiply determined. At the same time, scholars and practitioners repeatedly discuss a parent's history of childhood maltreatment as a key risk factor for th...

Results emphasize the importance of independent data for testing mediational claims, and support claims that the processes involved in the intergenerational transmission of psychopathology are different for male and female youth.

The developmental pathways linking maltreatment in early childhood and antisocial behavior in adolescence were examined using data from a longitudinal study of high-risk children and their families. Two developmental process variables, emotional/self-regulation (dysregulation) and establishing a close emotional relationship between the child and primary caregiver (alienation), were included in the model in an effort to better understand the pathway from maltreatment to antisocial behavior. The results indicated that alienation and, to a much lesser extent, dysregulation helped explain the relation between early maltreatment and later antisocial behavior. The model including the developmental process variables was a better representation of the data than the model considering only the direct effect between early maltreatment and later antisocial behavior. Physical abuse in early childhood, not emotional neglect, led to alienation in preschool, which then predicted early onset externalizing problems in the elementary school years, ultimately resulting in antisocial behavior in adolescence. One of the implications of these findings for preventing adolescent antisocial behavior is to intervene at an early age with a relationship-based program.