Child Health Study | Penn State College of Health and Human Development

Center for Safe and Healthy Children

Happy little girl swinging on a swing and smiling

About the Study

The Child Health Study is a prospective, longitudinal study of the impact of early-life stress in the lives of child maltreatment survivors enrolled at age 8-13 and followed biannually for a day-long, multi-level, bio-psycho-social assessment battery. This battery establishes pristine baselines from which to base strong inference and comprehensive modeling of how stress impacts health trajectories over time.

Child maltreatment (physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect) has been implicated as a potent early-life stressor that is associated with long-term alterations in key biological processes that increase risk for developing a spectrum of diseases. The precise mechanisms for how stress ‘gets under the skin’ or gets ‘embedded’ in biological systems to effect health remain somewhat elusive but likely involve programming of the developing brain and its regulatory outflow systems (i.e., neuroendocrine, immunologic) as well as epigenetic, cellular aging, and genetic plasticity.

There is a lack of deeply phenotyped, longitudinal studies prospectively modeling the sequencing of this embedding across development thus limiting knowledge regarding especially sensitive periods, optimal timing for interventions, windows of particular malleability, and opportunities for reversibility. The Child Health Study seeks to answer questions in this area.

CHS Aims

Aim 1. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the interplay among child maltreatment, the biological embedding of early-life stress, and health status (including optimal neuro development, behavioral & emotional health, and physical health).

Aim 2. To test how the biological embedding of early-life stress operates independently and in conjunction with psychosocial and behavioral factors to explain the relationship between maltreatment and health status.

Aim 3. To find key mechanisms that can spark novel interventions to impact the lives of children exposed to early-life stressors such as child maltreatment.

The rigorous methods of the Child Health Study set the stage for long-term lifespan follow-up whereby windows of vulnerability or opportunities for reversibility will be illuminated.

Strength-based research on the intersectionality of race/ethnicity and early-life stress

Researchers are documenting the disproportionality of families of color being investigated by child protective services and are illuminating the intersectionality of being a racial and ethnic minority exposed to child maltreatment. Given the diverse makeup of the sample, the Child Health Study examines this intersectionality and how it can exacerbate the embedding of early-life stress; perpetuate health, education, and economic disparities for minoritized youth; and further complicate the transition to adulthood through high rates of substance use, poor educational attainment, and involvement with the justice system.

Through innovative strength-based life-course risk models, the Child Health Study emphasizes how youth chronically exposed to adversity--including racism--may adjust to their environments by developing various competencies that allow for adaptive functioning despite such adversity. We do this through

comprehensive assessments of race-related stressors and strength-based constructs,
innovative analytic strategies to parse out the intersectionality, and
person-centered approaches to illuminate the unique experiences and pathways to resilience for racial and ethnic minority youth.