Children who have been exposed to maltreatment and other adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are at increased risk for various negative adult health outcomes, including cancer, liver disease, substance abuse, and depression. However, the proximal associations between ACEs and behavioral outcomes during the middle childhood years have been understudied. In addition, many of the ACE studies contain methodological limitations such as reliance on retrospective reports and limited generalizability to populations of lower socioeconomic advantage. The current study uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Well being Study, a national urban birth cohort, to prospectively assess the adverse experiences and subsequent behavior problems of over 3,000 children. Eight ACE categories to which a child was exposed by age 5 were investigated: childhood abuse (emotional and physical), neglect (emotional and physical), and parental domestic violence, anxiety or depression, substance abuse, or incarceration. Results from bivariate analyses indicated that Black children and children with mothers of low education were particularly likely to have been exposed to multiple ACE categories. Regression analyses showed that exposure to ACEs is strongly associated with externalizing and internalizing behaviors and likelihood of ADHD diagnosis in middle childhood. Variation in these associations by racial/ethnic, gender, and maternal education subgroups are examined. This study provides evidence that children as young as 9 begin to show behavioral problems after exposure to early childhood adversities.

No abstract

No abstract

A strong association between poverty and child neglect has been established, but the mechanisms that explain this relationship have not been clearly articulated. This research takes advantage of survey and child maltreatment administrative data about families with young children and assesses the influence of poverty and parenting characteristics on subsequent child neglect. The authors find that indicators of poverty, such as perceived material hardship and infrequent employment, and parenting characteristics, such as low parental warmth, use of physical discipline, and allowing a child to engage in frequent television viewing, are predictive of child neglect. Parenting characteristics do not appear to mediate the link between perceived hardship and neglect, although they suppress the link between employment and neglect. Results from this study provide information that is highly relevant to the approach and design of child maltreatment prevention and intervention strategies.

No abstract