The Value of Multiple‐Generation Cohorts for Studying Parenting and Child Development

Abstract

Participants in longitudinal studies that followed children into adulthood now have children of their own, which has enabled researchers to establish multiple-generation cohorts. In this article, I illustrate the benefits of multiple-generation cohort studies for developmental researchers, including: (a) the impact of child and adolescent characteristics (i.e., preconception factors) on parenthood can be studied from a developmental perspective and without having to rely on retrospective reports, (b) intergenerational continuity and transmission can be examined for psychological, behavioral, and social development, and by comparing parent and offspring generations for the same developmental period, and (c) the interplay of genetic and environmental influences on parenting and child development can be disentangled. Even though multiplegeneration studies pose unique logistical and methodological challenges, such cohorts are indispensable for rigorous research into parenting and the origins of child development.

Parental personality and early life ecology: a prospective cohort study from preconception to postpartum

“…Missing data within the achieved sample was very low for the five exposures, 10 covariates, and 16 postnatal outcomes, but higher for the six antenatal items (though still low compared with major cohorts of a similar timescale) 33 . VIHCS is one of very few long-term preconception cohorts with antenatal data 60 , due in part to the challenges of prospectively identifying all pregnancies to an existing cohort. We used multiple imputation to address potential biases using rich exposure, outcome and covariate information, a robust strategy at higher levels of missing data than here 61 , and note that for constructs assessed both antenatally and postnatally when missing rates were very low, the associations with personality were similar, suggesting minimal bias.…”

Intergenerational Transmission of Peer Aggression

“…What is more, the same genes that explain G1 peer aggression might also explain variance in G1 harsh parenting. Rigorous tests of genetic transmission that combine the benefits of the current study – assessment of child behavior at approximately the same age rather than using retrospective reports – with the inclusion of multiple reporters’ perspectives and genetic information are rare but innovative genetically-informed multiple-generation studies (Kretschmer, 2021 ) will play an important role in allowing for such research.…”

The Mediating Role of Parental Behavior between Anxiety and Body focused Repetitive Behavior Disorder among Adolescents

“…Parental low care and over control leads towards the variety of psychopathologies such as OCD, anxiety, depression (Zhang et al, 2021). The models of childhood anxiety mostly focused on the diverse extents of the parenting behaviors and the development of anxiety (Borschmann et al, 2019;Butterfield et al, 2020;Kretschmer, 2021;Spry et al, 2018;Taraban & Shaw, 2018;Wu et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2021). Previous literature described the positive relationship between overprotected behavior of parents and occurrence of obsessive compulsive behaviors including trichotillomania, excoriation and nail biting in their children (Chen et al, 2018).…”