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Research on Child Neglect
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In March 1999, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a special trans-NIH, interdepartmental Request for Applications (RFA OD-99-006) focusing on Research on Child Neglect for FY 2000. This initiative encouraged research on the etiology, extent, services, treatment, management, and prevention of child neglect. This Request for Applications (RFA) was intended to stimulate the development of programs of child neglect research at institutions that currently have strong research programs in related areas (e.g., child development, injury prevention, developmental neurobiology, child abuse, substance abuse, population research, craniofacial and dental public health, health services) but are not engaged in extensive research focusing on child neglect. A second goal of this RFA was to bring the expertise of researchers from the child health, education, and juvenile justice fields into the child neglect research field and to promote their collaborations with each other and with child neglect and abuse researchers.
This RFA, coordinated under the auspices of the NIH Child Abuse and Neglect Working Group (CANWG), was a joint effort of several components of the NIH, including the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Joining with NIH in this groundbreaking endeavor are the Children's Bureau of the Administration on Children, Youth and Families; the National Institute of Justice, and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, both within the Office of Justice Programs, Department of Justice; and the Office of Special Education Programs, within the Department of Education. The co-sponsors pledged by over $3,000,000 annually for these five year grants.
The NIH Child Abuse and Neglect Working Group (CANWG) was established in response to a recent directive by the House Committee on Appropriations, which requested that NIH report on current NIH efforts, accomplishments, and future plans for research on child abuse and neglect. The CANWG=s subsequent 1998 report recommendations were based on both an analysis of the NIH portfolio as well as on the 1993 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report, Understanding Child Abuse and Neglect. The NAS report included knowledge about the origins, consequences, treatment and prevention of child maltreatment among its top research priorities. Child neglect was also noted as a high priority research area in the 1998 Institute of Medicine report, Violence in Families: Assessing Prevention and Treatment Programs. This RFA is also responsive to recommendations from the October 1997 National Institute of Justice Child Abuse and Neglect Interventions Strategic Planning Meeting, as well as a June 1993 National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect-sponsored symposium on chronic neglect.
A technical assistance workshop was held in Bethesda, MD for all interested parties in July, 1999. Approximately 120 investigators attended this trans-NIH meeting. (See http://www.nimh.nih.gov/childhp/neglect_rfa.cfm for more information). Seventy-two applications were reviewed in January, 2000. Of these, 15 grants were selected for award, to form the core research site participants in the Federal Child Neglect Research Consortium. A summary of these grants appears below.
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Neglect, Adolescents, and Alcohol Use Disorders
Duncan Clark
Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Applying concepts derived from attachment theory, neglect is hypothesized to influence AUD and other adverse outcomes through low parental attachment, behavioral undercontrol, negative affectivity, and deviant peer influence. This is a one-year study to develop a measure with eight scales measuring non-overlapping dimensions of child neglect; and to examine the influence of two neglect dimensions, supervisory neglect and emotional neglect, on the onset, course and treatment outcome of alcohol use disorders (AUDs) during adolescence. This will be achieved through secondary data analyses using two complementary existing datasets.
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Child Neglect: Psychobiological Consequences
Michael DeBellis
Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
This is an innovative project to use MRI and urinary cortisol and catecholamine measures to assess neurobiology in very young age 3-10 children who have been neglected as compared with controls. The research links child neglect with adverse brain development and assessing the psychobiological consequences of child neglect, controlling for the effects of domestic violence, nutrition, and sociodemographic factors. After finding evidence that child neglect influences early brain development, interventions and rehabilitation strategies can be developed to reduce the consequences of such severe early environments to the child.. This project is one of the first studies of the biological consequences of child maltreatment, and where neglect is carefully differentiated from physical or sexual abuse.
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The Illinois Families Study: Child Well-Being
Jane Holl
University of Illinois, Chicago, Illinois
This grant, by a new investigator, focuses on the etiology of two specific forms of child neglect, physical neglect and supervisory neglect, examining the impact of welfare reform on the functioning of low-income families in nine Illinois counties (representing over 75% of the TANF caseload in the state). The specific aims of the project are to assess the relationships between child neglect and employment, income, and health care coverage, and to identify factors that mediate and/or moderate these relationships in order to clarify causal pathways leading to different forms of child neglect. Baseline assessments of child development will also be conducted to examine the impact of neglect on child developmental processes.
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Cocaine and Maternal Neglect: Intergenerational Effects
Josephine Johns
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
This research study examines cocaine use as one of the possible etiologies of child neglect using an animal model to study the bio-behavioral underpinnings of maternal neglect and abuse. The research builds upon more recent research that suggests not only is maternal neglect strongly correlated with drug abuse in women, but lower levels of oxytocin and cocaine use during pregnancy may be also been associated with general feelings of anger and hostility and difficulty with infant attachment in women. The investigators hypothesize that chronic and acute cocaine treatment will result in differential and significant patterns of maternal neglect/abuse of offspring at different times across the lactation period.
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Child Neglect: Cross Sector Service Paths and Outcomes
Melissa Jonson-Reid
Washington, University, St. Louis, Missouri.
This study will conduct a large-scale longitudinal analysis of cross-sector service utilization by neglected children and their families (subdivided by types of neglect) which is linked to outcomes at the family (e.g., reunification, etc.) and child (e.g., death, incarceration) levels. Using administrative data drawn from education, health, juvenile justice and social service agencies, this accelerated panel study compares the cross sector service paths and outcomes of children receiving AFDC and reported to child welfare agencies neglect; physical abuse; sexual abuse; and more than one type of maltreatment compared to a matched group of children in families receiving AFDC, but not reported to child welfare agencies. Analyses will be conducted within an eco-developmental framework, examining the influence of neglect while controlling for child, family, service sector use and community level factors.
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Glenda Kantor
University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire.
This grant seeks to develop parent and child report measures of neglect and to gather data on the prevalence of neglect in a community sample of households. Data will also be gathered from a clinical sample of families investigated for neglect. The study will describe characteristics of neglectful families in community and clinical samples, describe the relationship of neglect to child behavior problems, determine the relationship between domestic violence and/or substance abuse and child neglect, and determine the relationships of parental depression and parental attachment to child neglect.
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Neglectful Parenting and Children's Aggression
John Knutson
University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa.
This study will examine the importance of neglect and punitive discipline in the development of children=s aggression among an ethnically diverse sample of urban and rural communities recruited from Iowa, Nebraska and Wisconsin. It will use micro-social coding of direct observations of parent-child interactions to develop an understanding of the parent-child relations in neglecting families and make important distinctions between two forms of neglect: denial of critical care and supervision. By distinguishing between instrumental or proactive, and irritable or reactive aggression, the research will be able to determine whether neglect and punitive discipline differentially influence the development of different kinds of aggression in young school-age children.
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An fMRI Study of Health Mothers Hearing Infant Cries
Jeffrey P. Lorberbaum
Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina.
Using an innovative paradigm grounded in theory from animal and human research, this study will apply functional MRI (fMRI) to evaluate the brain basis of parental response to infant crying and how that may be related to characteristics of mother, infant and mother-infant interaction. While the functional neuroanatomy of human infant crying and parental response is largely unknown, studies of non-human mammals suggest that the brain's thalamocingulate circuit (a region including the cingulate and anterior part of the thalamus) play a large role. This three-year study will develop a functional MRI technique in order to eventually be able to test whether thalamocingulate circuit (TC circuit) activity differs in neglectful mothers. The regional brain activity in physically and psychiatrically healthy mothers while they listen to their own infant cry, a standardized infant cry, and control sounds matched for intensity, frequency, and temporal pattern with each of these cries will be examined along with an attentional control task. This developmental work will provide the groundwork to use this paradigm to test whether neglectful mothers have less TC circuit activity with cries than do non-neglectful parents, which would be consistent with the non-human mammal cingulate damage literature.
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Processes Linking Child Neglect and Adaptation to School
Michael Lynch
Hope Family Center, Rochester, New York.
This grant, by a new investigator, proposes a longitudinal investigation of the impact of parental neglect on school adjustment and academic performance in children ages 4 to 6 years old. The study aims to confirm previous links between child neglect and poor school performance and examine possible mediators and moderators of the links between neglect and poor adaptation to school, including attachment security, self-esteem, verbal and cognitive abilities and readiness to learn, maternal mental health, poverty, and domestic and community violence. Three cohorts of children will be recruited at age 4 and followed to the end of the first grade in order to test an ecological-transitional model of the impact of child neglect.
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Impact of Child Neglect in Substance Abuse Families
Ada Mezzich
Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In this research, male and female children of proband fathers with or without DSM-IV Substance Use Disorder (SUD) will be prospectively studied in a panel design to determine the impact of parental SUD on medical/dental, psychological and educational neglect. This project is unique in that it focuses on neglect in a population of older youth and adolescents which has not been systematically researched. It also enables prospective tracking of intraindividual factors in familial context that increase or decrease the risk for neglect and subsequent outcomes.
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Research on Child Neglect
Samuel Myers
Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, Minnesota, Minneapolis.
This project will increase our understanding of the scope of neglect among children of color by examining whether racial disproportionality can be explained by any one or more forms of bias that may arise when cases are processed through the child protective system. The central hypothesis to be tested is whether the observed racial disproportionality in reported and substantiated child neglect can be explained by reporting bias; substantiation laws; labeling bias; exposure bias; and/or aggregation bias. Using a methodology called a decomposition or residual difference method that permits the assessment of the relative sizes of each of these possible biases; it will provide other analysts with powerful tools for looking at racial inequality in other aspects of the health and welfare of children where the potential for reporting or similar biases is known to exist.
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Economic Status, Public Policy and Child Neglect
Christina Paxson
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.
This grant by a new investigator, focuses on the relationship between economic factors and child neglect. The research investigates how parental resources affect both physical and emotional neglect for children under 5. One major focus is to examine the effects on neglect of public policies. In-home assessments of children at age 30 and 48 months will be conducted, as part of the existing Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Project.
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Neglect and Adolescents: A Multi-Site Longitudinal Study
Des Runyan
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
This grant expands on an ongoing multi-site longitudinal study of 1435 maltreated and high-risk children, LONGSCAN (which has been funded by ACYF and NICHD). This study seeks to improve knowledge of neglect and child development through comparing alternative measures of neglect, assessing the consequences of childhood neglect for younger adolescents, and assessing the nature and impact of neglect during adolescence. Specifically, the grant examines the impact of neglect on adolescent mental health, delinquency, and substance abuse.
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The Impact of Neglect on Adolescent Development
Penny Trickett
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California.
This grant describes a multi-disciplinary study of developmental outcomes of neglect of female and male young adolescents from different ethnic backgrounds. The grant is guided by a developmental ecological perspective, and as such will consider both physical developmental and psychological impact with an emphasis on the transition from childhood into adolescence. It will consider not only child-rearing context and other family variables, but also neighborhood characteristics including the prevalence of community violence. A sample of 400 adolescents (aged 9-12) from the active cases of Los Angeles County Dept. of Child and Family Services and comparison sample of adolescents recruited from school settings will be studied using measures focusing on physical development, risk behaviors, social competence and social deviance.
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A Thirty-year Follow-up of Neglected Children
Cathy Widom
UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School, Newark, New Jersey.
This grant is a 30-year follow-up of a sample of 543 documented cases of child-neglect. All cases were less than 11 years of age at the time the neglect/abuse was documented. Assessments will include: health status and health risk behavior, economic productivity, neighborhood hazards/toxins, and past and present service utilization and access to care. This study will also develop a self-report measure of neglect and assess memories of neglect with documented history of neglect.
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