Historical Structural Racism in the Built Environment and Physical Health among Residents of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.

Historical structural racism in the built environment contributes to health inequities, yet to date, research has almost exclusively focused on racist policy of redlining. We expand upon this conceptualization of historical structural racism by examining the potential associations of probable blockbusting, urban renewal, and proximity to displacement from freeway construction, along with redlining, to multiple contemporary health measures. Analyses linked historical structural racism, measured continuously at the census-tract level using archival data sources, to present-day residents' physical health measures drawn from publicly accessible records for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Outcome measures included average life expectancy and the percentage of residents reporting hypertension, stroke, coronary heart disease, smoking, insufficient sleep, sedentary behavior, and no health insurance coverage. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine separate and additive associations between structural racism and physical health measures. Redlining, probable blockbusting, and urban renewal were associated with shorter life expectancy and a higher prevalence of cardiovascular conditions, risky health behaviors, and residents lacking health insurance coverage. Probable blockbusting and urban renewal had the most consistent correlations with all 8 health measures, while freeway displacement was not reliably associated with health. Additive models explained a greater proportion of variance in health than any individual structural racism measure alone. Moreover, probable blockbusting and urban renewal accounted for relatively more variance in health compared to redlining, suggesting that research should consider these other measures in addition to redlining. These preliminary correlational findings underscore the importance of considering multiple aspects of historical structural racism in relation to current health inequities and serve as a starting point for additional research.

Economic hardship and adolescent behavioral outcomes: Within- and between-family associations.

Understanding how youth perceive household economic hardship and how it relates to their behavior is vital given associations between hardship and behavioral development. Yet, most studies ignore youth's own perceptions of economic hardship, instead relying solely on caregiver reports. Moreover, the literature has tended to treat economic hardship as a stable force over time, rather than a volatile one that varies month-to-month. This study addressed extant limitations by collecting monthly measures of economic hardship, specifically caregiver- and youth-reported material deprivation and youth-reported financial stress, and youth internalizing and externalizing problems from 104 youth-caregiver dyads (youth: 14-16 years, 55% female, 37% Black, 43% White) over nine months. We examined month-to-month variability of these constructs and how youth-reports of material deprivation and financial stress predicted their behavior problems, controlling for caregiver-reports of material deprivation. We found that hardship measures varied month-to-month (ICCs = 0.69-0.73), and youth-reported material deprivation positively predicted internalizing when examining both within- and between-individual variability (ß = .19-.47). Youth-reported financial stress positively predicted within-individual variation in externalizing (ß = .18), while youth reports of material deprivation predicted externalizing when looking between families (ß = .41). Caregiver-reported material deprivation was unrelated to youth behavior when accounting for youth perceptions of economic hardship.

Beyond Neighborhood Disadvantage: Local Resources, Green Space, Pollution, and Crime as Residential Community Correlates of Cardiovascular Risk and Brain Morphology in Midlife Adults.

OBJECTIVE: Residing in communities characterized by socioeconomic disadvantage confers risk of cardiometabolic diseases. Residing in disadvantaged communities may also confer the risk of neurodegenerative brain changes via cardiometabolic pathways. This study tested whether features of communities-apart from conventional socioeconomic characteristics-relate not only to cardiometabolic risk but also to relative tissue reductions in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus. METHODS: Participants were 699 adults aged 30 to 54 years (340 women; 22.5% non-White) whose addresses were geocoded to compute community indicators of socioeconomic disadvantage, as well as air and toxic chemical pollutant exposures, homicide rates, concentration of employment opportunities, land use (green space), and availability of supermarkets and local resources. Participants also underwent assessments of cortical and hippocampal volumes and cardiometabolic risk factors (adiposity, blood pressure, fasting glucose, and lipids). RESULTS: Multilevel structural equation modeling demonstrated that cardiometabolic risk was associated with community disadvantage ( ß = 0.10, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.01 to 0.18), as well as chemical pollution ( ß = 0.11, 95% CI = 0.02 to 0.19), homicide rates ( ß = 0.10, 95% CI = 0.01 to 0.18), employment opportunities ( ß = -0.16, 95% CI = -0.27 to -0.04), and green space ( ß = -0.12, 95% CI = -0.20 to -0.04). Moreover, cardiometabolic risk indirectly mediated the associations of several of these community features and brain tissue volumes. Some associations were nonlinear, and none were explained by participants' individual-level socioeconomic characteristics. CONCLUSIONS: Features of communities other than conventional indicators of socioeconomic disadvantage may represent nonredundant correlates of cardiometabolic risk and brain tissue morphology in midlife.

Unpacking the Home Numeracy Environment: Examining Dimensions of Number Activities in Early Childhood.

A growing body of research has examined parents' practices to support their young children's number learning at home, i.e., the home numeracy environment. Many of these studies focus on formal and informal domains of numeracy activities, which are inconsistently defined and related to children's math learning. In this study, we explore dimensions of the home numeracy environment and examine their relations with children's math skills among a sample of four-year-old children and their parents over the course of one year. Parents reported on the frequency of 21 numeracy activities when children were four and five. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed a two-factors solution: number-related play activities and use of educational materials with numbers. Frequency of play with numbers was positively related to children's ability to solve applied math problems at age five, controlling for prior number skills, child age, and socioeconomic status. In contrast, neither measure of the home numeracy environment predicted symbolic number knowledge or non-symbolic number sense when controlling for covariates. These findings underscore the need to differentiate between factors of the home numeracy environment and to develop clear theoretical definitions of these factors.

Associations among socioeconomic status and preschool-aged children's, number skills, and spatial skills: The role of executive function.

Extensive literature has documented socioeconomic status (SES) disparities in young children's standardized math achievement, which primarily reflect differences in basic number and arithmetic skills. In addition, growing evidence indicates that direct assessments of executive function (EF) both predict standardized math achievement and mediate SES differences in standardized math tests. However, early spatial skills and children's approximate number system (ANS) acuity, critical components of later math competence, have been largely absent in this past research. The current study examined SES associations with multiple direct assessments of early ANS, cardinality, and spatial skills, as well as standardized math achievement, in a socioeconomically diverse sample of 4-year-old children (N = 149). Structural equation modeling revealed SES effect sizes of .21 for geometric sensitivity skills, .23 for ANS acuity, .39 for cardinality skills, and .28 for standardized math achievement. Furthermore, relations between SES and children's spatial skills, ANS acuity, cardinality, and standardized math skills were mediated by a composite measure of children's EF skills. Implications of pervasive SES disparities across multiple domains of early math development, as well as the mitigating role of EF, are discussed.

Time spent playing predicts early reading and math skills through associations with self-regulation.

Children's play time has declined in recent decades, which could negatively impact early self-regulation-a vital component of school readiness. To date, studies have not fully explored how the time spent playing relates to children's self-regulatory skills, and in turn, their early reading and math competencies. Using data from time diaries and direct assessments of self-regulation, prereading, and math skills, this study examined how minutes spent playing at home predict these skills in a sample of 128 children followed from age four to five. Additionally, it considered whether self-regulation explained links between play time and prereading and math. Results showed that the time spent playing positively related to children's self-regulation. Moreover, through its association with self-regulation, play time had indirect effects on prereading and math skills measured one year later. Results suggest that fostering opportunities for play time during the preschool years may help to boost school readiness skills.

Examining income dynamics and externalizing and internalizing trajectories through a developmental psychopathology lens: A nationally representative study.

Prior research has documented elevations in levels of internalizing and externalizing behaviors among children in lower income families in comparison to more advantaged peers. However, most studies focus on behavior problems at a single point in time or within a short developmental period. Associations between income dynamics and developmental trajectories of behavior problems over time are less understood. To address this, the current study uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (N = 7,476; 50.8% male) to examine how income dynamics (annual income and income volatility) across three distinct developmental periods from early childhood to early adolescence relate to trajectories of externalizing and internalizing problems. Group-based mixture modeling revealed a five-group trajectory model for externalizing behavior and a four-group trajectory model for internalizing behavior. Higher cumulative annual income predicted greater likelihood of belonging to the low-stable group compared to the other, more problematic groups for both externalizing and internalizing trajectories. In addition, income losses predicted higher risk of membership in any group other than the low-stable group for internalizing and externalizing behavior. Developmental period-specific income dynamics, though not as consistent as cumulative dynamics, also predicted trajectory group membership.

REFLECTIONS ON QUALITY AND DOSAGE OF PRESCHOOL AND CHILDREN'S DEVELOPMENT.

This ambitious monograph tackles several important questions related to children's preschool experiences that have relevance for program and policy initiatives at the state and federal levels. The authors' approach is rigorous: they conduct parallel analyses across eight large and diverse studies of preschool children in center care and use meta-analysis to summarize patterns across studies. The study finds nonlinear associations between preschool quality and gains in language and literacy skills, with larger associations in higher versus lower quality classrooms. Results also show that domain-specific measures of preschool quality were more strongly related to children's development than global quality measures. The "dosage" of preschool was likewise important: more years in Head Start predicted larger vocabulary and literacy gains, whereas more time spent on instruction predicted greater literacy and math skills growth. In this commentary, we situate these findings in the broader literature addressing links between preschool experiences and children's development and discuss key takeaways for research, practice, and policy.

Historical Structural Racism in the Built Environment and Contemporary Children's Opportunities.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: There are well-documented links between structural racism and inequities in children's opportunities. Yet, when it comes to understanding the role of the built environment, a disproportionate focus on redlining obscures other historical policies and practices such as blockbusting, freeway displacement, and urban renewal that may impact contemporary child development. We hypothesized that historical structural racism in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania's, built environment would be associated with fewer contemporary educational, socioeconomic, and health opportunities. We also hypothesized that these measures would explain more collective variance in children's opportunities than redlining alone. METHODS: We used geospatial data from the US Census, Mapping Inequality Project, and other archival sources to construct historical measures of redlining, blockbusting, freeway displacement, and urban renewal in ArcGIS at the census tract level. These were linked with data from the Child Opportunity Index 2.0 to measure children's opportunities across domains of education, socioeconomic status, and health. We ran spatial regression analyses in Stata 18.0 to examine individual and collective associations between structural racism and children's opportunities. RESULTS: Historical redlining, blockbusting, and urban renewal were largely associated with fewer contemporary educational, socioeconomic, and health opportunities, and explained up to 47.4% of the variance in children's opportunities. The measures collectively explained more variance in children's opportunities than redlining alone. CONCLUSIONS: In support of our hypotheses, novel measures of structural racism were related to present-day differences in children's opportunities. Findings lay the groundwork for future research focused on repairing longstanding harm perpetuated by structural racism.

Toddler home math environment: Triangulating multi-method assessments in a U.S. Sample.

Introduction: Current research has documented the home math environment (HME) of preschoolers and kindergarteners. Very few studies, however, have explored the number and spatial activities in which parents engage with children during their toddler years. Methods: This study examined the HME of 157 toddlers using several methodologies, including surveys, time diaries, and observations of math talk. Further, it examined correlations within and across data sources to identify areas of convergence and triangulation, and correlated HME measures with measures of toddlers' number and spatial skills. Results: Findings showed that, in general, uses of different types of math activities, including both number and spatial, were intercorrelated within method. Across methods, there was high intercorrelation between the frequency of math activities reported on parent surveys and the diversity of types of math activities endorsed in time diary interviews. Parent math talk gleaned from semi-structured interviews functioned as a separate aspect of the HME; different types of math talk shared few intercorrelations with engagement in math activities as reported in either surveys or time diaries. Finally, several HME measures positively correlated with toddlers' math skills. Discussion: Given extant research demonstrating that both math activities and math talk predict children's math skills, our results stress the need for multimethod studies that differentiate among these HME opportunities.

Self-regulation in toddlers and the emergence of pre-academic disparities.

A growing body of research has examined how children's self-regulation during early and middle childhood mediates SES disparities in academic achievement. Evidence suggests that these self-regulation skills begin developing even earlier, during the toddler years, but more work is needed examining how different measures of self-regulation relate to key constructs such as socioeconomic status (SES) and toddlers' pre-academic skills. In this online study, we examine multiple approaches to measuring self-regulation using confirmatory factor analyses and assess the extent to which self-regulatory skills help explain SES differences in early math and language skills among a sample of 158 two- and three-year-old children. Self-regulation was assessed through a battery of parent- and examiner-ratings. Children's counting, cardinality, and vocabulary skills were measured online through direct assessments and parent surveys. Two self-regulation factors emerged representing parent-reported and observational measures, and only observational measures of self-regulation mediated associations between SES and children's math and language skills. Parent-reported self-regulation was not uniquely related to SES or children's pre-academic skills, underscoring the need for careful consideration of how self-regulation is measured among toddlers when examining its associations with pre-academic skills.

Child development at the intersection of race and SES: An overview.

Racial/ethnic disparities in socioeconomic status (SES) persist in the United States. These disparities perpetuate the intergenerational transmission of inequality. Although families of color vary significantly in socioeconomic standing and evidence suggests the links between SES and child development may differ by race/ethnicity, we know relatively little about how race and SES interact to shape children's social contexts and developmental outcomes. This chapter draws theoretical insights from sociocultural perspectives on development and intersectionality theory to understand how and why family life and child development may play out in complex ways at the nexus of race and SES.

Poverty and Academic Achievement Across the Urban to Rural Landscape: Associations with Community Resources and Stressors.

Poor children begin school with fewer academic skills than their nonpoor peers, and these disparities translate into lower achievement, educational attainment, and economic stability in adulthood. Child poverty research traditionally focuses on urban or rural poor, but a shifting spatial orientation of poverty necessitates a richer examination of how urbanicity intersects with economic disadvantage. Combining geospatial administrative data with longitudinal survey data on poor children from kindergarten through second grade (N ≈ 2,950), this project explored how differences in community-level resources and stressors across urbanicity explain variation in achievement. Resources and stressors increased in more urbanized communities and were associated with academic achievement. Both mediated differences in poor children's achievement. Mediation was both direct and indirect, operating through cognitive stimulation and parental warmth.

Safe and sound? Exploring parents' perceptions of neighborhood safety at the nexus of race and socioeconomic status.

Racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps appear in early childhood, persist into adolescence, and undermine long-term well-being. Scholarship typically examines whether family socioeconomic inequality explains racial skills gaps; however, increasing research indicates that the academic returns to socioeconomic status (SES) differ for Black and White children and that the size of Black-White achievement gaps vary by SES, with the largest disparities evident among the highest-SES students. The processes underlying the development of within-SES racial gaps remain unclear, though growing evidence suggests that racial disparities in proximity to (dis)advantage shape family life in critical ways. In particular, Black-White differences in proximity to spatial (dis)advantage may have serious implications for young children's health and well-being. Yet, little research has directly explored how race and family economic status shape children's family and neighborhood contexts. This chapter presents a mixed-methods study that integrated semi-structured interview, neighborhood observation, and neighborhood crime data from a socioeconomically-diverse sample of Black and White families to explore how the interplay between race and family economic status shapes parents' perceptions of neighborhood safety. Findings revealed that race intersects with SES to produce complex patterns of inequality in community life and neighborhood conditions. Although economic disadvantage places limits on all parents, irrespective of race, dangerous conditions and stressors at the neighborhood level tended to be more pronounced and take a more pernicious form among low-income Black parents. Higher income granted parents escape from the most serious threats to their children's well-being, but the returns to increases in SES were not equivalent for middle-income Black and White families, and only among the most affluent families did race differences diminish considerably or disappear altogether.

The Role of Family Income Dynamics in Predicting Trajectories of Internalizing and Externalizing Problems.

Economic disparities in children's behavioral functioning have been observed in prior research. Yet, studies have ignored important perspectives from developmental psychopathology and have not delineated how aspects of income dynamics (i.e., cumulative family income versus income volatility) differentially relate to behavior problems. To address these limitations, the current study examined how both cumulative income and income volatility predict trajectories of children's internalizing and externalizing problems from kindergarten through fifth grade in a nationally representative sample of 10,900 children (51.4 % male). Results showed four distinct trajectories of internalizing problems and five distinct externalizing trajectories. Family income dynamics were related to trajectory group membership. Specifically, increased cumulative income decreased risk of membership in mid-increasing and mid-stable internalizing groups, and children whose families experienced multiple waves of income loss were 2.4 times as likely to be in the mid-increasing group instead of the low-stable group. With respect to externalizing, higher cumulative income increased the likelihood of belonging in the group exhibiting stably low externalizing problems. Experiencing income loss increased the risk of belonging in the trajectory group exhibiting chronically high externalizing behaviors. These results enhance our knowledge of the role of family income in the development of behavior problems.

Family income and early achievement across the urban-rural continuum.

Rural and suburban children account for the majority of poor children in the United States. Yet, most research examining poverty's associations with child development is focused on urban samples. Using nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (N ≈ 6,600), this study examines whether the form and magnitude of income's relationship with early achievement differ across the urban-rural continuum. Results suggest that there are urbanicity-related differences in the functional form of the association between income and early achievement, with nonlinear associations in urban and suburban areas and a linear relationship in rural areas. The magnitude of the association between income and early reading and math skills also differs across the urban-rural continuum, such that income increases are related to the greatest improvements in early academic skills in large urban areas and only slight improvements in rural areas.

Timing, extent, and type of child care and children's behavioral functioning in kindergarten.

Prior research has unearthed a link between early education and care (EEC) experiences and worse behavioral functioning for children, yet the research has not clearly delineated whether this link is due to early entry into care (timing), extensive hours of care (extent), or use of center-based care (type). Using a nationally representative sample of children followed from infancy through kindergarten (N ≈ 6,000), we assessed links between EEC timing, extent, and type, and children's kindergarten functioning. Both center-based and full-time preschool predicted heightened behavior problems and more limited learning behaviors in kindergarten, with care type and extent functioning additively. EEC during infancy and toddlerhood showed limited independent links with children's later functioning, but it exacerbated negative associations between preschool and children's kindergarten behaviors.