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7 - Middle Childhood Life Course Trajectories: Links Between Family Dysfunction and Children's Behavioral Development
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- By Linda S. Pagani, Professor at the School of Psycho-Education, University of Montreal, Christa Japel, Professor in the Department of Specialized Education and Training, University of Quebec at Montreal, Alain Girard, Statistician for the Research Unit on Children's Psycho-Social Maladjustment, University of Montreal, Abdeljelil Farhat, Statistician for the Center of Excellence in Early Childhood Development, University of Montreal, Sylvana Côté, Assistant Professor at the School of Psycho-Education, University of Montreal, Richard E. Tremblay, Research Chair in Child Development and Professor for the Departments of Psychology, Psychiatry, and Pediatrics, University of Montreal
- Edited by Aletha C. Huston, University of Texas, Austin, Marika N. Ripke, University of Hawaii, Manoa
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- Book:
- Developmental Contexts in Middle Childhood
- Published online:
- 16 September 2009
- Print publication:
- 12 June 2006, pp 130-149
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
In their extensive review of the literature on family adversity, Repetti, Taylor, and Seeman (2002) offer their conception of “risky families” as those that offer low warmth and support and are neglectful. Children in such families are likely to show disruptions in emotion processing, social cognition, and regulatory systems involving stress responses, as well as poor health behaviors across the life span. Exposure to conflict and aggression, frequent concomitants of prolonged dysfunctional family relations, encourages deficits in the control and expression of emotion and social competence, disturbances in physiologic and neuroendocrine system regulation, and health threatening addictions. That is, persistent family stress may disrupt the basic homeostatic processes that are central to development by repeatedly activating important bodily systems. Drawing upon the cumulative risk concept of allostatic loading (McEwan, 1998), the biopsychosocial challenge model suggests that children growing in risky environments face a compounded “cascade of risk” for mental and physical health disorders across the life span.
In youngsters, such outcomes manifest themselves most often as behavior problems (Tremblay, Vitaro, Nagin, Pagani, & Séguin, 2003). Some behavior-based research has documented an increased risk of behavioral difficulty in association with parental conflict (Emery, 1999; 2001; Fincham, Grych, & Osborne, 1994; Grych, Fincham, Jouriles, & McDonald, 2001; Wagner, 1997), control (Barber, 1996), coercion, and counter-coercion (Rothbaum & Weisz, 1994; O'Connor, Deater-Deckard, Fulker, Rutter, & Plomin, 1998; Patterson, 2002).