FAMILY AND CHILDREN WELL BEING RESEARCH NETWORK

The NICHD Research Network on Child and Family Well-being proposal. Enhancing the Well-Being of Children and Parents: Research, Practice and Policy has as its goal the generation of policy-relevant research via three Individual Research Projects and four Cooperative Research Projects. The PI of the proposal is Brooks-Gunn, a developmental pscyhologist at Columbia University's Teachers College. The Co-Investiagors are a child psychiatrist, a pediatrician, a sociologist an economist in social work an eduational psychologist, and a developmental psychologist--Felton Earls Marie McCormick, Sara McLanahan, Irv Garfinkel, John Love, and Lindsay Chase-Lansdale. The proposed projects involve analyses of large longitudinal and often nationally representative, data sets designed by inter-disciplinary teams. These data sets include the Fragile Families Study, the Early Head Start National Evaluation, the Welfare Reform and Children in Three Cities Study, the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, the PSID-Child Supplement, the Yonkers Study, the Moving to Opportunity Study, and the Infant Health and Development Program. Four are experiments, and four are not. The projects all focus on children and the contexts in which they grow up, with a particular emphasis on the family and on the family's interaction with other contexts (child care, school, neighborhood, and work place). Ecological, risk and resilience, and resource models are combined to look at child well-being as a function of contexts and policies. Child well-being measures include achievement, emotional well-being, physical health, and social relationships. This proposal considers three broad developmental periods--young childhood (birth to 5 years), late childhood (6 to 10 years), and young adolescence (11 to 15 years). Contextual influences are hypothesized to vary as a function of developmental epoch, outcome, and initiat child characteristics. The Individual Research Projects are entitled (i) Families and Early Intervention, Preschool and School; (ii) Families and Neighborhoods; and (iii) Families and Work, Time, Income and Stress. The Cooperative Research Projects are (i) Child and Family Well-being Indicators and National Data Sets; (ii) Welfare, Anti-poverty, and Residential Policies (as examined via experimental demonstrations); (iii) Father, Marriage, Paternal Involvement and Policy; and (iv) Quality of Child Care and Policy.