Session: Family Processes and Child Development
Tracing the Path: Child Maltreatment Relates to Trajectories of Peer Aggression and Victimisation (Pin Chen, University of Oxford)
Child maltreatment is a well-established risk factor for peer aggression and victimisation, yet children show heterogeneity in patterns of perpetration and victimisation across development. This study examined whether early maltreatment predicts co-occurring developmental trajectories of peer aggression and victimisation from childhood to adolescence. Data came from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (N = 16,425; 49.0% girls). Child maltreatment was assessed at age 5, and peer aggression and victimisation at ages 7, 11, and 14. Group-based multi-trajectory modelling identified four joint trajectories: Uninvolved (69.8%), Childhood Victims (14.4%), Mid-adolescence Victims (10.1%), and Victim-perpetrators (5.7%). Multinomial regression showed that both the presence and severity of maltreatment were associated with increased likelihood of involvement in peer aggression and victimisation.
How Externalising Behaviour Mediates the Impact of Highest Parental Education on School Absences (Samara Marta, University of Strathclyde)
Socio-economic status (SES) is a well-established predictor of school absenteeism (Sosu et al., 2021). Parental education is among the most consistent SES predictors of absenteeism, with low parental education being one of the strongest risk factors (Klein et al., 2020). Despite strong evidence linking SES and absenteeism, the mechanisms underlying this association remain underexplored. Low SES is associated with higher levels of externalising difficulties (Barry et al., 2023), and these difficulties are highly correlated with truancy and school absences (Finning et al., 2019). Thus, this study addresses this gap by examining whether children’s externalising behaviour mediates the relationship between highest parental education and school absences in England’s primary education system.
The interaction of genes and parenting in the formation of socioemotional skills (Giovanni Scotti Bentivoglio, University of Groningen)
This paper investigates the interplay between genetics and parenting in the development of socioemotional skills, by estimating and modeling the joint evolution of skills and parental investments across childhood and adolescence. Results show that genetic predispositions have a sizeable and persistent impact on the evolution of socioemotional skills, both directly and through their effects on parental investments. Parents react to socioemotional difficulties with a harsher discipline and lower time spent with the child, which in turn increases the child’s socioemotional problems, thus widening initial differences in skills. Overall, this study documents the importance of incorporating genetics in models of skill formation and shows that ignoring genes can result in the misestimation of the returns to skills and investments.
