Early Childhood Predictors of Low‐income Boys’ Pathways to Antisocial Behavior in Childhood, Adolescence, and Early Adulthood

Abstract

Guided by a bridging model of pathways leading to low-income boys’ early-starting and persistent trajectories of antisocial behavior, the current paper reviews evidence supporting the model from early childhood through early adulthood. Using primarily a cohort of 310 low-income boys of families recruited from WIC centers in a large metropolitan area followed from infancy to early adulthood, and smaller cohorts of boys and girls followed through early childhood, we provide evidence supporting the critical role of parenting, maternal depression, and other proximal family risk factors in early childhood that are prospectively linked to trajectories of parent-reported conduct problems in early and middle childhood, youth-reported antisocial behavior during adolescence and early adulthood, as well as court-reported violent offending in adolescence. The findings are discussed in terms of the need to identify at-risk boys in early childhood and methods and platforms for engaging families in health care settings not previously used to implement preventive mental health services.

Psychology of Boys at Risk: Indicators From 0–5

“…These authors provide a strong argument for the early effects of caregiving inadequacies that seem mostly related to maternal depression (as low maternal responsiveness), for the greater vulnerability of boys to these early inadequacies, and for the need to institute early interventions to prevent the behavior from becoming almost impossible to rectify later. These same associations might be found for girls, but Shaw and Gilliam declare that it seems “reasonable to infer that boys are at heightened risk relative to girls for showing serious forms of antisocial behavior during adolescence as a result of adverse family context in early childhood” (p. 68).…”

The early biopsychosocial development of boys and the origins of violence in males

“…Perhaps because of boys’ slower development, infant boys display greater vulnerability to maternal depression than do girls. Many researchers have reported this difference (Carter, Garrity‐Rokous, Chazan‐Cohen, Little, & Briggs‐Gowan, ; Hammen, Hazel, Brennan, & Najman, ; McGinnis et al., ; Mileva‐Seitz et al., ; Shaw & Gilliam, ; Shaw & Vondra, ; Terrell, Conradt, Dansereau, LaGasse, & Lester, this issue; Tronick & Weinberg, ; Weinberg, Olson, Beeghly, & Tronick, ). A recent example is the research supplied by Beeghly et al.…”

Risk factors for antisocial behavior in children: comparison between boys and girls

“…Regarding hyperactivity behavior, this is also considered a predictor of future aggressive and violent behavior (Shaw & Gilliam, 2017), being associated more with boys than girls (Giannotta & Rydell, 2016).…”

“…With regard to girls it is claimed that they are prone to a higher number of institutionalizations , tend to establish weak affective bonds with the mother or female caregiver; they develop more often depressive problems (Kerig, 2014;Urben et al, 2016) and internalization problems (e.g., isolation behaviors) (Leve, Chamberlain, & Kim, 2015) and experience some kind of neglect, mistreatment or abuse (Kerig, 2014). As for boys, they seem to use physical violence more often as a way to solve problems (Gardner et al, 2015); they tend to have a high number of externalizing problems (Kristoffersen, Obel, & Smith, 2015) and greater comorbidity with hyperactivity attention deficits (Shaw & Gilliam, 2017). However, there has been a greater investment in the study of male antisocial behavior, with few studies integrating girls in their samples.…”