Domestic Violence, Child Security & Child Mental Health

描述（由申请人提供）：尽管伴侣间暴力增加了儿童对心理健康问题的脆弱性，但人们对正在展开的调解机制、增强和保护条件知之甚少，这些机制和条件有助于形成家庭暴力和儿童适应不良之间潜在联系的多种途径，特别是在幼儿期。为了解决这些差距，我们的主要目标是在情感安全理论的框架内确定家庭暴力与幼儿适应之间的联系所涉及的途径。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Although interpartner violence increases child vulnerability to mental health problems, little is known about the unfolding mediating mechanisms and the potentiating and protective conditions that help shape the multiplicity of pathways underlying associations between domestic violence and child maladjustment, especially in early childhood. To address these gaps, our broad objective is to identify the pathways involved in the link between domestic violence and young children's adaptation within the framework of the emotional security theory. Our specific aims include: (1) examining whether direct exposure to the interpartner relationship and parenting difficulties mediate the link between interpartner violence and child maladjustment; (2) testing the hypothesis that the mediational role of parenting difficulties and exposure to destructive interpartner relations are further explained by child difficulties in preserving their emotional security in the interpartner and parent-child relationships; (3) charting the developmental interplay between child emotional security, resolution of stage-salient tasks, and mental health; and (4) delineating how family characteristics may alter paths between family processes, child emotional security, and child mental health. Two-hundred and fifty mothers, who have experienced a range of violence in relationships with their partners, and their 2-year-old children will participate in a three-wave longitudinal study, with measurement occasions spaced one year apart. To address earlier methodological limitations in the literature (e.g., monomethod bias; cross-sectional design; focus on a single domain of child functioning), we utilize a multi-method, prospective design that captures multiple levels of child adjustment (e.g., symptoms, competence, neuroendocrine functioning). Our three-wave project is designed to increase the power to test the temporal and conceptual ordering of our variables in mediator and moderator models and to facilitate the charting of the nature and correlates of individual differences in trajectories of child mental health.