Prenatal methamphetamine exposure, home environment, and primary caregiver risk factors predict child behavioral problems at 5 years.

Abstract

This study investigated the prospective association between prenatal methamphetamine (MA) exposure and child behavioral problems at 5 years while also examining the home environment at 30 months and several primary caregiver (PC) risk factors. Participants were 97 MA-exposed and 117 comparison children and their PCs enrolled in the Infant Development, Environment and Lifestyle Study. Hypotheses were that child behaviors would be adversely impacted by (a) prenatal MA exposure, (b) home environments that provided less developmental stimulation and emotional responsiveness to the child, and (c) the presence of PC psychological symptoms and other risk factors. Prenatal MA exposure was associated with child externalizing behavioral problems at 5 years. Home environments that were more conducive to meeting children’s developmental and emotional needs were associated with fewer internalizing and externalizing behavioral problems. Independent of prenatal MA exposure, PC parenting stress and psychological symptoms were associated with increased child behavioral problems. Findings suggest prenatal MA exposure may contribute to externalizing behavioral problems in early childhood and the importance of considering possible vulnerabilities related to prenatal MA exposure in the context of the child’s caregiving environment.

Risk Factors for Internalizing and Externalizing Problems in the Preschool Years: Systematic Literature Review Based on the Child Behavior Checklist 1½–5

“…Studies related to substance abuse found that pre-pregnancy risk drinking (Knudsen et al 2014) increased IEP, methamphetamine use during pregnancy increases IEP ) and EP (Twomey et al 2013), tobacco exposure during pregnancy (Liu et al 2013) and maternal smoking during child preschool years increases IEP (Paterson et al 2013). One study reported non-significant results to the effect of methamphetamine exposure during pregnancy in EP (Liles et al 2012).…”

“…It is probably due to the sample size that differences were not found, which is concordant with the idea that the larger samples allow the identification of effects, even if they are minor. Three (Velders et al 2011;LaGasse et al 2013;Twomey et al 2013) of the studies that surveyed the influence of maternal age found significant differences between younger and older mothers-younger mothers report more IEP than the older ones. Only one study (Gleason et al 2011) found no significant results.…”

“…The unique study that account for non-significant results is the one with the smallest sample, however it shares the sample with LaGasse et al (2013) and Twomey et al (2013) studies, given that they are from the same longitudinal study and have a similar number of participants in the analyses. Perchance differences among these three studies are due to the fact that they do not use the same exact participants.…”

“…Perchance differences among these three studies are due to the fact that they do not use the same exact participants. For instance in the study of Twomey et al (2013) These findings should be analyzed in the context of maternal functioning as maternal substance abuse and maternal psychological difficulties coexist in many cases and it may be difficult to ascertain their relative influence on IEP. For example, one study found that the co-occurrence of maternal drug use and psychological distress may further compromise overall behavioral health and parenting behavior (Accornero et al 2002).…”

“…Other studies stated that low emotional stimulation (Twomey et al 2013) and less sensitive parenting (Ciciolla et al 2014) increase the odds of children developing IEP. In addition one study reported that low quality of parenting increases IP, but not EP (Poehlmann et al 2010), and two studies (Twomey et al 2013;Ciciolla et al 2014) indicated that parenting stress increases IP. Attending to all of these results one can hypothesize that it is not parenting per se that can influence child's outcomes.…”