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FINNUT-Forskning og innovasjon i utdanningssektoren

Socioeconomic risk, learning and development from infancy through early adolescence (SLEDE)

Alternative title: SLEDE

Awarded: NOK 12.0 mill.

Children's physical aggression development (e.g. hitting and kicking) follows different developmental paths. While the majority of children show some aggression in certain periods of early childhood which decreases with increasing age, there is a small group who show high and persistent aggression throughout childhood and further into school age. The development is linked to characteristics of the child itself, conditions in the family and the environment in which the child grows up, and in turn has significance for the child's further well-being and functioning, both socially, emotionally and behaviorally. There is very little research that has had the opportunity to study the overall significance of various predictors that we know are linked to children's development of aggression, both for how this development looks throughout childhood, and what significance this has for the child's further functioning. By using the rich data set from the study Children's social development, we have identified developmental trajectories for physical aggression from infancy to pre-school age (1-5 years) and tested how this development is linked to early relationships related to the child and the family. We have also studied the significance of the development of aggression for the children's functioning in 2nd grade, as assessed by the children's teacher. We find that the development of aggression is characterized by a total of 9 different developmental trajectories. A small proportion of the children (3%) showed high and persistent aggression, while 14% showed little or no physical aggression during this period. Most children showed the most aggression around age 2, followed by a steady decline towards age 5, although the course and level varied. The results further showed that both mothers' and fathers' early use of unnecessarily strict parenting behavior is important for the development of aggression, where a lot of use of this type of parenting behavior was associated with a high level of aggression. The child's gender also mattered - being a boy was associated with more aggression. Having siblings close in age was also linked to the development of aggression - children who had siblings showed more aggression than those without. The children's gender also had a strong connection with all outcomes in 2nd grade, including externalizing and internalizing behaviour, social competence, and academic functioning in school. Which development path the children followed also had an impact on how much externalizing behavior they showed in 2nd grade. This is one of the first prospective studies to show that both father's and mother's early negative parenting behavior is important for children's development of aggression and emphasizes the importance of including fathers both in research and in preventive and treatment measure. Both mothers' and fathers' supportive parenting behaviors (ie, sensitivity, warmth, stimulation, and commitment to the child) in early childhood have been shown to be associated with children's positive socioemotional development. However, there are few studies that have considered how both mother's and father's supportive parenting behavior can have a simultaneous effect on children's development. We studied direct and moderated longitudinal relationships between mother's and father's supportive parenting behavior when the child was 24 and 36 months old and fathers' and teachers' reports of children's socioemotional and behavioral adaptations in first grade. After controlling for the child's temperament (activity level and soothability) in infancy, the results showed that fathers' degree of supportive parenting behavior was associated with fewer symptoms of child hyperactivity/impulsivity as reported by fathers. There was also a significant interaction between mothers' and fathers' supportive parenting behavior for three of the four outcomes: externalizing difficulties, hyperactivity/impulsivity and social skills. There was also a negative relationship between parenting behavior and children's externalizing behavior and hyperactivity/impulsivity when the other parent showed low levels of supportive parenting behavior. The results also showed that the fathers' parenting behavior had a positive relationship with the children's social skills when the mothers showed little supportive parenting behavior and support the importance of both mothers and fathers for children's development. Fathers' supportive parenting behavior towards their children (degree of sensitivity, commitment and intrusiveness, positive and negative expressions towards the child, and stimulation of the child's development) depends on various contextual conditions, including mothers' supportive parenting behaviour. Research shows that how long mothers breastfeed their children is linked to mothers' supportive parenting behavior (longer breastfeeding time is linked to more supportive parenting behaviour). However, it is not known whether

The SLEDE project is based on previous findings of socioeconomically risk for academic underachievement and social-emotional maladjustment that is actualized because of increasing social inequality, also in egalitarian societies like the Norwegian. We take a novel approach to understand, and ultimately help prevent, social inequalities in school achievement and psychosocial functioning. Specifically, we will study how socioeconomic status influences children's development of social-emotional and cognitive skills within the Norwegian context of the family, early childhood education and care, schools, and the neighborhood, and how this is linked with academic achievement and social-emotional functioning in early adolescence. We will also study how social-emotional development, in a context of socioeconomic disadvantage, is influenced by cumulative stressors, and how this relates to psychosocial adaptation in the school context (bullying and victimization). We will utilize data from the Behavior Outlook Norwegian Developmental Study (BONDS), comprising 1157 children and their families from age 6 months and currently through 2nd grade, which includes frequent multi-method and multi-informant measures. This rich dataset will give detailed information on all major transitions in the educational pathway from early infancy through early adolescence, and enables the investigation of individual developmental processes as they interact with variables in a multilevel contextual structure within a transactional framework. Multiple time points of measurement allows for both analyses of change over time with growth curve models and growth mixture models, and longitudinal structural models when measures change over time, or auto-regressive cross-lagged panel models. The project is a collaboration with national and international researchers that are in the front of the field.

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FINNUT-Forskning og innovasjon i utdanningssektoren