Parents' Adverse and Positive Childhood Experiences and their Parenting Practices in the Context of Neighborhood Safety

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

PROPOSAL SUMMARY Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are childhood exposures to potentially traumatic family and community experiences that can have lasting, negative impact on health, are a driver of health disparities, and have potential intergenerational transmission of effects. Preliminary data from the parent study for this proposed study indicate that ACEs are highly prevalent in low-income, urban parents, with 54.7% of 139 parent participants reporting 4 or more ACEs. Positive childhood experiences (PCEs) are relational experiences that confer a sense of safety and nurturance during childhood, such as feeling safe with at least one adult in the home. PCEs are associated with improved physical and mental health. PCEs have the potential to promote positive outcomes even when ACEs are high. Current neighborhood violence is expected to compound the impact of ACEs on parenting practices due to ongoing or recurrent activation of neurobehavioral responses to threat. The purpose of this convergent mixed methods study is to understand how parents' exposures to ACEs and PCEs impact their parenting practices, particularly in the context of living in unsafe neighborhoods by addressing the following specific aims: 1: Test the associations among parents' ACEs, PCEs, and more positive parenting practices in a sample of parents (n=200) raising young children (2-8 years old) in Baltimore. 2: Examine contextual effects of current neighborhood safety (violent crime rate and parent perception) by testing the interactions between threat-type ACEs and neighborhood safety variables, controlling for other neighborhood-level SES characteristics. 3: Understand how parents' own childhood experiences (ACEs and PCEs) influence their parenting practices in the context of low versus moderate to high neighborhood safety. The proposed study will be nested within an ongoing parent study in Baltimore City Public Schools. The proposed study will use baseline data only for a cross-sectional quantitative arm, followed by a qualitative arm that integrates with the quantitative data. Multivariate regression, multilevel modeling, and conditional process modeling will be used to test associations among ACEs, PCEs, and parenting, and then to test these associations and the association with neighborhood safety. In the qualitative phase, indvidual interviews will use an interpretive phenomenological approach to gain a better understanding of the processes and contextual factors that contribute to participants' parenting in the context of neighborhood safety. This design integrates the analysis of associations between ACEs, PCEs, parenting practices, and neighborhood safety with analysis of parents' perspectives on the impact of their childhood experiences on parenting, role of neighborhood safety, and other contextual variables. This research will identify protective factors in the intergenerational transmission of ACEs and uses geospatial data to explore how neighborhoods influence the impact of ACEs and PCEs. It will inform future research on family- and neighborhood-level interventions to promote safe, stable, nurturing relationships in families and neighborhoods to reduce the rate and impact of ACEs.