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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
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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).
6 - Prevention during pregnancy, infancy and the preschool years
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- By Richard E. Tremblay, GRIP, University of Montreal, Canada, Christa Japel, GRIP, University of Montreal, Canada
- Edited by David P. Farrington, Institute of Criminology, Cambridge, Jeremy W. Coid, St Bartholomew's and Royal London School of Medicine
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- Book:
- Early Prevention of Adult Antisocial Behaviour
- Published online:
- 22 September 2009
- Print publication:
- 17 April 2003, pp 205-242
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Summary
Much attention has been paid to the increase in delinquent behaviour from pre-adolescence to the middle of adolescence, followed by its decrease from late adolescence to early adulthood (Elliott, 1994; Farrington, 1986). Using official statistics, the director of the Brussels Observatory in the early nineteenth century, Quetelet (1833), described this phenomenon and concluded that ‘This fatal propensity seems to develop in proportion to the intensity of physical strength and passions in man’. More recently, Ellis and Coontz (1990) concluded that this crime bell curve could be explained by the increase of testosterone levels during puberty.
Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the link between the ‘strength of passions’ during early childhood and later delinquency. There is evidence that the most disruptive toddlers are at highest risk of becoming the most deviant adolescents and adults (Caspi, Moffitt, Newman and Silva, 1996; Stattin and Klackenberg-Larsson, 1993; White, Moffitt, Earls, Robins and Silva, 1990). Furthermore, there is evidence that the peak frequency of physical aggression during an individual's life is generally attained at around 24 months after birth (see Figure 6.1, and Tremblay et al., 1996; Tremblay, Mâsse, Pagani and Vitaro, 1996) and not during mid- or late adolescence. Observational studies of the frequency of physical aggression between toddlers count the number of physical aggressions within a fifteen or thirty minute period (e.g., Hay and Ross, 1982), while studies during adolescence generally count the frequency of aggressions over a twelve-month period.