Economic Stress & Child Development Across 3 Generations

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This application seeks 5 years of support to investigate the role of family economic stress in the development of young children. The proposed project will extend previous research on a cohort of over 500 early adolescents that began in 1989 and continues today. Funding for 5 more years will make it possible to examine the life trajectories of cohort members from 12 to 32 years of age. The participants in the study grew up during a time of economic depression in the rural Midwest. Earlier phases of the project have examined how those hardship experiences influenced the lives of cohort members (G2) and their parents (G1). The next phase of the research will extend the investigation to the oldest child (G3) of members of the original cohort. The rich archive of information on the G2 generation during adolescence and early adulthood (e.g., multi-informant reports on personality, psychiatric disorders, education and work, beliefs, values, and cognitive abilities) provides a unique opportunity to evaluate the combined influence of personal characteristics and economic circumstances on child development. Specifically, the study will examine: (1) how personal characteristics of G2 parents influence continuity in economic hardship between the G1 and G2 generations (the intergenerational hypothesis), (2) the degree to which family stress processes connect G2 economic hardship to G3 development (the family stress hypothesis), (3) whether parental investments in children link G2 economic hardship to G3 development (the parental investments hypothesis), and (4) whether earlier G2 characteristics explain both G2 hardship and child development, thus eliminating the connection between economic stress and child development (the spuriousness hypothesis). Results of the study will provide important new information regarding vulnerability and resilience to the possible health and developmental consequences of economic hardship. Because of the long-term, multi-generational, prospective design of the study, and because of the broad spectrum of multi-informant measures used to describe the development of G2 and the estimated 250 G3 children in the investigation, this research is uniquely positioned to evaluate several competing hypotheses regarding economic stress and children's lives that have not been adequately addressed in previous studies.