Developmental science has long documented how economic hardship constrains children and families; a fuller account also requires understanding the strengths and adaptive strategies families draw on and develop as they navigate financial scarcity and instability. The present study examined video-based narratives from 39 U.S. parents of young children living at or below 200% of the federal poverty level as they reflected on daily family life amid economic hardship and the strengths they saw in themselves and their children. We analyzed 433 prompt-level transcripts using structural topic modeling (STM) and team-based qualitative review, an integrative analytic approach designed to combine scalable pattern detection with close attention to caregivers’ meanings. A 15-topic STM solution was synthesized into six meta-topics, revealing that adaptation unfolded through routines of care, hidden labor around cascading costs, inconsistently accessible support, children’s relational and context-specific strengths, family-level resourcefulness and repair, and resistance to stigmatizing narratives of poverty. A companion public-facing video blog series (rapidsurveyproject.com) shares parent narratives with policymakers, educators, and lay audiences. Together, these findings highlight the value of caregiver narratives for building more balanced developmental accounts of poverty and informing supports that build on family strengths while reducing structural inequities.

The COVID-19 pandemic negatively impacted Latine families, who experienced disproportionate rates of infection and economic hardship. Using a national sample collected between April 2020 and September 2022, we explored parenting stress among 2191 Latine mothers of children under six years old in the U.S. Path analysis confirmed that household experiences of material hardship, but not parental unemployment, significantly predicted increases in parenting stress. Elevated parenting stress during the pandemic was further associated with significant increases in child fussiness/defiance and fear/anxiety behaviors. In addition, parental unemployment had a direct negative effect on children's fussiness/defiance behaviors. Structural Topic Modeling (Roberts, 2019) discerned 11 themes from open-ended survey responses provided in English on what was challenging for Latine mothers and their families. Four topics- cost of basic needs (food), disrupted family life and social isolation, struggles with emotional distress, and lack of childcare/early intervention services -were significant predictors of parenting stress, which was linked to significant increases in children's emotional distress. Universal and targeted strategies to promote resilience for Latine children are discussed.

BACKGROUND:For families with young children, securing reliable childcare may present a significant challenge. Rising costs, limited resources and the COVID-19 pandemic have heightened the precarity of childcare arrangements. Childcare precarity, defined as a state of insecure or unreliable childcare arrangements while parents work or attend school, reflects unpredictability in family life and early care and education settings and has important implications for families' economic and psychosocial well-being. This study aims at broadening the conceptualization of childcare precarity to include childcare search status and examine its association with caregiver and child emotional distress. METHODS:Participants were 3115 caregivers in the United States (88% female, 67% white) who completed the RAPID Survey between November 2022 and December 2023 and reported working or attending school. We assess whether including a childcare search status as an indicator of precarity improves the cross-sectional prediction of caregiver and child emotional distress beyond commonly used indicators (unreliability and disruptions). Using a person-centred approach, we also conduct an exploratory latent class analysis (LCA) to identify distinct experiences of childcare precarity and associated emotional distress. RESULTS:Childcare unreliability and disruptions were associated with caregiver distress. For children, unreliability was associated with fear/anxiety, while disruptions were associated with fussiness/defiance. Childcare search status was also linked to both caregiver and child emotional distress, improving model fit compared to baseline models. Our exploratory LCA identified a five-class solution as optimal, with emotional distress outcomes varying significantly across classes and correlating with levels of precarity. DISCUSSION:Our findings highlight the importance of a multidimensional approach to childcare precarity. Identifying distinct precarity profiles can inform targeted policy interventions to support diverse family needs. Future research should validate these findings and explore the broader impact of early life unpredictability.

This study examined whether different forms of cash, a one-time, lump sum payment compared to a series of smaller payments delivered at regular intervals, promote families' food security in different ways. A lump sum payment, which provides a large amount of money at once, may have the power to reduce food insecurity intensely and immediately, but these effects would likely diminish as the payment is spent down. Regular payments, alternatively, may promote smaller changes in food insecurity, but these effects would likely last longer. We estimated longitudinal models using surveys from the RAPID-EC dataset, which assessed food insecurity among U.S. families with young children (N = 3,347) before and after they received a lump sum payment, the economic stimulus payments of 2021, and regular payments, the monthly expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) payments. We found that both forms of payment predicted declines in food insecurity. However, the lump sum, stimulus payments were associated with reductions in severe indicators of food insecurity immediately and only reductions in less severe indicators in the months to follow. The regular CTC payments predicted declines in food insecurity most months, with variations in severity across months, suggesting they may not have been large enough to promote food security at times when other pressing expenses arose. These findings suggest that lump sum payments may be better suited for addressing food insecurity during times of crisis, while regular payments may be more appropriate for longer-term stability, so long as the amount is large enough.

Economic hardship is known to shape children’s self-regulation, yet little is understood about how fluctuations in hardship unfold over time and whether different patterns of unpredictability carry unique developmental consequences. Using a socioeconomically diverse sample, we tracked families’ subjective economic hardship across 15–36 monthly assessments and applied an environmental statistics framework to quantify four indices of unpredictability: changepoints in mean, changepoints in variance, coefficient of variation, and noise. Principal component analysis revealed two distinct dimensions of economic unpredictability: systematic instability (frequent but predictable hardship fluctuations) and dynamic variability (infrequent but abrupt shifts in hardship). Economic unpredictability was disproportionately experienced by racially minoritized and lower-income families, reinforcing systemic inequities in economic resources. Relations between these indices and caregiver-reported measures of family routines and day-to-day unpredictability were weak, suggesting wide heterogeneity in the ways families adapt to economic unpredictability. Leveraging propensity score methods, we isolated the effects of unpredictability from hardship severity, finding that they predicted greater self-regulation challenges in early childhood, with the strongest effects for hardship severity. These findings underscore the importance of capturing economic hardship as a dynamic and multidimensional experience, with implications for policy efforts aimed at promoting stability in families’ access to resources.

Children are highly sensitive to adversity during their first five years of life, with exposure to chronic parental mental illness (MI) consistently linked to socio-emotional impairments and mental health problems in children. Children born during the COVID-19 pandemic were exposed to unprecedented levels of parental distress, with parental MI reported at three times the pre-pandemic rates. This situation underscored a pressing need for scalable solutions to foster positive mental health and developmental outcomes for a generation of children. In response, we developed the Building Emotional Awareness and Mental Health (BEAM) program, an innovative mobile health (mHealth) solution for parents of young children. Clinical trials to date evaluating BEAM have shown promising results, demonstrating reductions in parent depression, suicidality, anxiety, and harsh parenting practices. This trial involves an effectiveness-implementation hybrid design with co-primary aims of (1) determining BEAM’s effectiveness in improving parent mental health, and (2) evaluating the implementation of BEAM in the community through metrics such as feasibility, acceptability, and uptake. This trial’s secondary aim is to measure BEAM’s effectiveness in improving short-term child mental health and developmental outcomes using primary data and long-term psychosocial family outcomes using administrative data. A final exploratory aim of this trial will measure the cost-utility of delivering BEAM relative to extant health programming. A single arm trial with repeated measures will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of implementing the BEAM intervention in the community with a sample of 400 parent participants with a child aged 24–71 months. Participants must self-report moderate to severe symptoms of depression, anxiety, parenting stress, and/or anger at time of enrolment (T0) and live in the province of Manitoba, Canada. Individuals will be recruited through four streams including the (1) Manitoba Crisis Response Services, (2) primary care offices (paediatricians and/or general practitioners), (3) Manitoba family community organizations and child care centres, and (4) social media. Study participants will complete 12 weeks of psychoeducation modules, with access to an online social support forum and check ins with a peer coach. Assessments of parent and child mental health symptoms will occur at pre-test before BEAM begins (T1), immediately after the last week of the BEAM intervention (post-test, T2), 6-month follow-up (T3), and 12-month follow-up (T4). The BEAM program offers a promising solution to address elevated parental mental health symptoms, parenting stress, and related child functioning concerns. The present implementation trial aims to extend the groundwork established by an open pilot trial and RCT of the BEAM program, in a next step of testing BEAM’s readiness for nationwide scaling. ClinicalTrials.gov NCT06455397. Registered on June 11, 2024.

This study investigates the characteristics of US households in which very young children are contributing to the family in different ways. We leveraged parent surveys of 616 diverse families with at least one child below age six. In small but noteworthy proportions of families, young children were contributing to the family via household tasks (45%), caregiving (14%), providing emotional support (5%), and translating (2%). Households with relatively lower socioeconomic status were significantly more likely to have their young children involved in caregiving, providing emotional support, and translating for family - but there were no socioeconomic differences in children's help with household tasks. Controlling for household socioeconomic status, homes with a family disability were significantly more likely to have their young child below age six involved in caregiving, homes with an older sibling above age six were significantly more likely to have their young child providing emotional support, and homes with younger and older siblings were significantly more likely to their young child completing household tasks. These findings suggest that even very young children contribute to the family in meaningful ways, especially in households with more socioeconomic barriers, disability, and more children.

The long-existing racial/ethnic wealth gaps in the U.S. persist during the COVID-19 pandemic due to income inequalities and other structural racism experiences, which may contribute to racial/ethnic disparities in material hardship experiences. This study examined material hardship disparities and factors that may contribute to racial/ethnic wealth gaps among U.S. families with young children during the pandemic. Using survey data collected from a large national study among parents of children under six years old between April 2020 and October 2022 (N = 6,903; 7.23 % Black, 12.33 % Hispanic/Latino[a]; 29.03 % below 200 % FPL), this study revealed factors that substantially contributed to racial/ethnic wealth gaps, including debt, home ownership, income changes, and discrimination experiences. Moreover, Black and Hispanic/Latino(a) households of middleto-higher-income levels reported more material hardships than White households with similar income, suggesting that higher income levels could not fully compensate for the systemic, generationally accumulated wealth gaps or equitably protect families of color from hardships in the pandemic. Although not directly studying the total wealth amount, this study provided compelling evidence for racial/ethnic structural inequalities in the wealth accumulation processes and hardship experiences, highlighting the pervasive economic vulnerability among not only lower-income households, but also middle-to-higher-income Black and Hispanic/Latino(a) families with young children.

IntroductionThe COVID-19 pandemic may constitute a traumatic event for families with young children due to its acute onset, the unpredictable and ubiquitous nature, and the highly distressing disruptions it caused in family lives. Despite the prevalent challenges such as material hardships, child care disruptions, and social isolation, some families evinced remarkable resilience in the face of this potentially traumatic event. This study examined domains of changes perceived by parents of young children that were consistent with the post-traumatic growth (PTG) model as factors that facilitate family resilience processes.MethodsThis study drew data from the RAPID project, a large ongoing national study that used frequent online surveys to examine the pandemic impact on U.S. households with young children. A subsample of 669 families was leveraged for the current investigation, including 8.07% Black, 9.57% Latino(a), 74.44% non-Latino(a) White families, and 7.92% households of other racial/ethnic backgrounds. In this subsample, 26.36% were below 200% federal poverty level.ResultsApproximately half of the parents reported moderate-to-large degrees of changes during the pandemic, and the most prevalent domain of change was appreciation of life, followed by personal strengths, new possibilities, improved relationships, and spiritual growth. Black and Latino(a) parents reported more changes in all five domains than White parents and more spiritual growth than parents of the other racial/ethnic groups. Moreover, parent-reported improved relationships were found to indirectly reduce young children’s overall fussiness/defiance and fear/anxiety symptoms through reducing parents’ emotional distress. Perceived changes in the new possibilities, personal strengths, and appreciation of life domains were found to serve as protective factors that buffered the indirect impacts of material hardship mean levels on child behavioral symptoms via mitigating parents’ emotional distress.DiscussionThese findings shed light on resilience processes of a family system in a large-scale, disruptive, and stressful socio-historical event such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The five PTG domains could inform therapeutic and intervention practices in the face of future similar events. Importantly, these findings and the evinced family resilience should not negate the urgent needs of policy and program efforts to address material hardships, financial instabilities, and race/ethnicity-based structural inequalities for families of young children.

Adverse experiences throughout development confer risk for a multitude of negative long-term outcomes, but the processes via which these experiences are neurobiologically embedded are still unclear. Adolescence provides an opportunity to understand how these experiences impact the brain's rapidly changing structure. Two models are central to current adversity conceptualizations: a cumulative risk model, where all types of experiences are combined to represent accumulating stress, and a dimensional model, where certain features of experience (e.g., threat or deprivation) exert unique neurophysiological influence. In this registered report, we extended upon previous research by using a form of representational similarity analysis to examine whether the dimensional and cumulative risk models of adversity predict cortical thinning in frontoparietal and frontotemporal networks and volumetric changes in subcortical regions throughout adolescence. Drawing from a longitudinal sample of 179 adolescent girls (ages 10-13 years at the first wave) from Lane County, Oregon, United States, and up to four waves of follow-up data, we found that operationalizing adversity by similarity in threat and deprivation provided better prediction of brain development than similarity in overall adversity. However, these dimensions do not exhibit unique associations with developmental changes in the hypothesized brain changes. These results underscore the significance of carefully defining adversity and considering its impact on the entire brain. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Systemic racism and discriminatory practices continue to disproportionally expose Black children and families to less than optimal health and economic resources. COVID-19 sheds existing light on how long-standing systemic inequalities affecting Black children and families create racial disparities in accessing material resources. The purpose of this study ( N = 704 Black caregivers) is to better understand the rela-tionship between experiences of racial discrimination, access to material resources (i.e., health-promoting resources and economic resources), and Black children's behavioral functioning during the pandemic. Through the application of ordinary least squares regression analysis, we find that inadequate material resources (both health-related risks and economic hardship) during the pandemic were associated with heightened caregiver report that their child was frequently fussy or defiant (externalizing) and frequently anxious or fearful (internalizing). The study found no significant links between caregivers' experiences of discrimination during the pandemic and children's behavioral functioning. However, the study found a significant link between caregivers' concern for their children's experiences of discrimination and their children's externalizing behaviors. Findings from this study offer an important contribution to under-standing how factors rooted in systemic racism-access to material resources-and experiences of dis-crimination affect Black children's well-being during COVID-19.(c) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This article describes RAPID survey as a methodology to elicit and amplify the voices of adults in young children’s lives – parents and child care providers. Born out of the COVID-19 pandemic, RAPID subsequently evolved into a platform that gathers actionable data to advance science and inform data-driven, evidence-based early childhood policy, practice, and systems. We describe the overarching architecture, key principles, and conceptual model of RAPID, and provide a summary of published findings from RAPID national survey from 2020-2024. We conclude the paper by describing the myriad ways where RAPID is used after the pandemic, being implemented in state/local contexts around the US and elsewhere as a tool for early childhood systems redesign. RAPID overarching goals are to foster a paradigm change in early childhood developmental and educational research, to contribute to mitigating structural/systemic disparities, and to promote healthy, equitable environments for young children to reach full developmental potential.

Parents of young children were a subgroup of the population identified early in the pandemic as experiencing significant mental-health symptoms. Using a longitudinal sample of 3,085 parents from across the United States who had a child or children age 0 to 5, in the present study, we identified parental mental-health trajectories from April to November 2020 predicted by pre–COVID-19 cumulative risk and COVID-19-specific risk factors. Both growth-mixture modeling and latent-growth-curve modeling were used to test the relationship between risk factors and parent mental health. Pre–COVID-19 cumulative risk and COVID-19-specific risks of financial strain, decreased employment, and increased family conflict were salient risk factors predicting poor mental-health trajectories across both modeling approaches. These finding have public-health implications because prolonged exposure to mental-health symptoms in parents constitutes a risk factor for child development.

Efforts to prevent mental health challenges in childhood and adolescence have the potential for far-reaching impact, given that a significant proportion of mental health challenges emerge in childhood. In the present chapter, we review prevention and promotion efforts in the area of child and adolescent mental health. We begin by reviewing key considerations when conceptualizing youth mental health prevention and promotion efforts, outlining guiding questions for considering efforts from multiple dimensions. We then review youth preventive mental health efforts by setting of delivery, adopting an ecological systems perspective. Specifically, we review and highlight considerations related to preventive interventions delivered at the family level, in school settings, in primary healthcare settings, at the community level, and via policy. Finally, we identify five directions in which the field of youth mental health prevention and promotion appears to be advancing, including toward a more dimensional (compared to categorical) approach, toward an increasingly digital approach, toward novel methodologies, toward an increased emphasis on social determinants, and toward an increasingly global perspective. Throughout, we note the value of identifying mechanisms of change and continually improving infrastructure to successfully implement preventive interventions, facilitating their translation from research to practice.

Objective This study examined how the COVID-19 pandemic differently affected households of children with versus without special healthcare needs. We compared caregivers' and children's emotional well-being (Aim 1), the utilization of preventive healthcare services for young children (Aim 2), and the promotive effects of social support on well-being outcomes (Aim 3) during the pandemic between the two groups. Methods Data were drawn from an ongoing, large, longitudinal, and national survey that assessed the pandemic impact on households of young children (0-5). Analyses for Aims 1 and 2 were based on 10,572 households, among which 10.96% had children with special healthcare needs. Analyses for Aim 3 were based on a subsample of 821 families, among which 12.54% had children with special healthcare needs. Results Caregivers of children with special healthcare needs exhibited more emotional distress and reported higher levels of household children's behavioral problems during the pandemic. The percentages of missed preventive healthcare visits and vaccinations were also higher in families of children with special healthcare needs due to structural barriers. Lastly, emotional social support was indirectly related to children's decreased behavioral problems through caregivers' reduced emotional distress, only among households of children without special healthcare needs. In other words, social support alone was not sufficient in promoting caregivers' and children's better well-being outcomes among households of children with special healthcare needs. Conclusions The pandemic has caused extensive burdens on families of children with special healthcare needs. Actions from policymakers and early intervention service providers are urgently needed to mitigate these impacts.

Objectives:Children with neurodevelopmental delays show higher levels of externalizing behavioral problems, resulting in increased parental stress. This study aims to determine if the frequency of family routines moderates children's externalizing problems and associated parental stress based on children's cognitive ability longitudinally. Methods:Children with neurodevelopmental delays and caregivers (N = 202) participated in assessments that included the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Forth Edition, Child Behavior Checklist, Parent Daily Report, and Family Routines Inventory. Child participants were 28 to 72 months old (M = 48.00, SD = 10.652) and predominantly male (69.3%). Results:Frequency of family routines at baseline (b = - .375, SE = .112, p = .001) was associated with lower child externalizing behaviours at baseline (b = - .104, SE = .047, p = .031). Frequency of family routines moderated parental stress for children with average (i.e., at the mean; b = - .211, SE = .119, p = .08) and above average (i.e., 1SD above mean; b = - .436, SE = .177, p = .02) nonverbal skills. Longitudinally, increased frequency of family routines (b = - .193, SE = .092, p = .04) was associated with less child externalizing behaviors. Conclusions:Findings demonstrate that routines may reduce parental stress, but the use of routines alone may be less practical for children with lower verbal skills. Additionally, the importance of routines for minimizing behavioral problems in children was significant for children with average or higher nonverbal skills at baseline, suggesting that nonverbal skills are protective for these children.

Existing and emerging evidence indicates that perinatal depression is a key contributor to preventable morbidity and mortality during and after childbearing. Despite this, there are few effective options for prevention and treatment that are readily accessible for and appealing to pregnant people. Aspects of routine health care systems contribute to this situation. Furthermore, societal and health care systems factors create additional barriers for people of color, people living in rural regions, and people living in poverty. Our interprofessional team of perinatal care providers, mental health providers, community partners, health services scientists, health equity scientists, and business leaders developed and are piloting a perinatal mental health preventive intervention designed to increase access and appeal of a program incorporating mindfulness cognitive behavioral therapy with proven efficacy in preventing perinatal depression. In this article, we briefly summarize key systems barriers to delivering preventive care for perinatal depression in standard prenatal care clinics. We then describe Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Perinatal Depression and outline our adaptation of this intervention, Center M. Finally, we identify next steps, challenges, and opportunities for this recent innovation.

Objectives: Adolescents in foster care may exhibit differential patterns of brain functioning that contribute to their pervasive socioemotional challenges. However, there has been limited investigation of implicated neural processes, particularly in the social domain. Thus, the current study investigated neural responses to exclusionary and inclusionary peer interactions in adolescents in foster-care. Methods: Participants comprised adolescents aged 11-18 years in foster care (N = 69) and a community sample (N = 69). They completed an fMRI adaptation of Cyberball, a virtual ball-throwing paradigm, that included periods of exclusion and over-inclusion. To investigate neural sensitivity to peer social experiences, we quantified neural responses that scaled with consecutive inclusionary and exclusionary interactions (using parametric modulators). Results: Relative to the community sample, adolescents in foster care exhibited increasing response to consecutive exclusionary events in lateral prefrontal regions and decreasing response to consecutive inclusionary events in the intraparietal sulcus and temporo-occipital cortex. Further, exploratory analyses revealed that dorsolateral prefrontal activation to exclusion was related to externalizing problems, particularly in the foster care sample. Conclusions: Findings highlight greater neural sensitivity to exclusionary, and lesser sensitivity to inclusionary, peer interactions in adolescents in foster care. Engagement of prefrontal clusters may reflect greater salience and emotion regulatory processes during exclusion, while parietal and temporal clusters may reflect reduced attention and behavioural engagement during inclusion. Thus foster care involvement is associated with broad changes in neural responses during peer interactions, and further these potentially relate to externalizing problems that have been identified in this vulnerable population.

Young children from low-SES backgrounds are at higher risk for delayed language development, likely due to differences in their home language environment and decreased opportunities for back and forth communicative exchange. Intervention strategies that encourage reciprocal caregiver-child interactions may effectively promote young children’s language development and enhance optimal language outcomes. The Filming Interactions to Nurture Development (FIND) program is a brief strength-based video-coaching intervention designed to promote increased back and forth (“serve and return”) interactions between caregivers and their children. The current study used data from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to examine the effectiveness of the FIND program in improving auditory comprehension and expressive communication skills among children from low-SES backgrounds. The current study used a pretest–posttest design to evaluate intervention effects from an RCT with 91 low-SES families. Families with children aged 4 to 36 months old (41.8% female) were randomly assigned to an active control or FIND intervention group. Children’s auditory comprehension and expressive communication were assessed using the Preschool Language Scales, Fifth Edition (PLS-5) during both pre- and post-intervention sessions. Children in the FIND intervention group showed significantly increased expressive communication skills and a non-significant increase in auditory comprehension skills across the intervention period. In contrast, children in the active control group showed non-significant changes in expressive communication and a statistically significant decline in auditory comprehension abilities between pre- and post-intervention assessments. All analyses controlled for sex, age, and home language. This study provides preliminary evidence that the FIND intervention promotes the development of expressive and receptive language skills among young children in high-stress, low-SES environments.