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Protective behaviors subject to heterogeneous socioeconomic and structural constraints may lead to unequal health outcomes during health emergencies.

The Sociology Department presents: The Paradox of Social Progress for LGBTQ+ Youth and the Untapped Potential of Family

The School of Public Policy presents: Karabelle Pizzigati Initiative Lunch and Learn: Child Well-being with Dr. LaShawnda Kilgore from the Children's Defense Fund

Plan could virtually end child poverty

Five-year R01 project will examine kin relationships in Nairobi, Kenya

Erich Battistin examines a relatively understudied early-childhood intervention for low birth-weight infants using new policy parameter

We offer a new strategy to identify the distribution of treatment effects using data from the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP), a relatively understudied early-childhood intervention for low birth-weight infants. We introduce a new policy parameter, QCD, which denotes quantiles of the effect distribution conditional on latent neonatal health. The dependence between potential outcomes originates from a new class of factor models where latent health can affect the location and shape of distributions. We first show that QCD depends on quantiles of marginal outcome distributions given latent health. We then achieve identification of these marginal distributions and QCD by proxying latent health with neonatal anthropometrics and accounting for measurement error in these proxies. The effects of enrolling in IHDP are widely distributed across children and depend on neonatal health. Moreover, the large average effects documented in past work for close to normal birth weight children from low-income families are driven by a minority of children in this group.

Susan W. Parker, Public Policy

Objective Exposure to early adversity carries long term harmful consequences for children's health and development. This study aims to 1) estimate the prevalence of childhood adversity for Australian children from infancy to 10-11 years, and 2) document inequalities in the distribution of adversity according to socioeconomic position (SEP), Indigenous status, and ethnicity. Methods Adversity was assessed every two years from 0-1 to 10-11 years in the nationally representative birth cohort of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (N=5,107). Adversity included legal problems; family violence; household mental illness; household substance abuse; harsh parenting; parental separation/divorce; unsafe neighborhood; family member death; and bullying (from 4-5 years). Adversities were examined individually and summed for a measure of multiple adversity (2+ adverse experiences). Results By 10-11 years, 52.8% (95% CI 51.0-54.7) of children had been exposed to two or more adversities. When combined with low SEP, children from ethnic minority and from Indigenous backgrounds had four to eight times the odds of exposure to two or more adversities than children from higher SEP Anglo-Euro backgrounds, respectively (OR 4.3, 95% CI 2.8-6.6 and OR 8.1, 95% CI 4.4-14.8). Ethnic minority and Indigenous children from higher SEP backgrounds had increased odds of exposure to multiple adversity than similarly advantaged Anglo-Euro children (OR 1.8, 95% CI 1.4-2.3 and OR 2.3, 95% CI 1.3-4.3, respectively). Conclusions Addressing early adversity is a significant opportunity to promote health over the life course, and reduce health inequalities experienced by marginalized groups of children.

Michel Boudreaux, Health Policy and Management, and Anuj Gangopadhyaya, Urban Institute