Child and Adolescent Violence Research at NIH

be discouraged, including such acts as youths bullying or hitting other children or engaging in "minor" delinquent acts such as shoplifting.

Research examining the mental health outcomes of child abuse and neglect has demonstrated that childhood victimization places children at increased risk for delinquency, adult criminality, and violent criminal behavior. Findings from early research on trauma suggest that traumatic stress can result in failure of systems essential to a person's management of stress response, arousal, memory, and personal identity that can affect functioning long after acute exposure to the trauma has ended. One might expect that the consequences of trauma can be even more profound and long lasting when they influence the physiology, behavior, and mental life of a developing child or adolescent.

Peer Influences Antisocial children with earlier ages of onset tend to make friends with children similar to themselves. Consequently, they reinforce one another's antisocial behavior. Children with ADHD are often rejected due to their age-inappropriate behavior, and thus are more likely to associate with other rejected and/or delinquent peers. The influence of delinquent peers on lateronset antisocial behavior appears to be quite strong. Association with antisocial peers has been shown to be related to the later emergence of new antisocial behavior during adolescence among youths who had not exhibited behavior problems as children.

Less adult supervision allows youths to spend more time with delinquent peers. Thus, improving parental supervision may be an important way to reduce the effects of delinquent peer influence. Ongoing research is examining how neighborhood effects on antisocial behavior are mediated by the willingness of neighbors to supervise youths and possibly reduce the likelihood of association with delinquent peers in the neighborhood.

Socioeconomic Factors An inverse relationship of family income and parental education with antisocial behavior has been found in many population-based studies. Across gender and ethnicity, much of the inverse relationship between family income and antisocial behavior is accounted for by less parental monitoring at lower levels of socioeconomic status.

Prevention and Intervention In recent years, several effective programs and strategies to prevent youth violence have been developed and tested.

Pre-School Children The Nurse Home Visitation Program, partly funded by the NIMH, is a 20-year model of research in which nurses visit mothers beginning during pregnancy and continuing through their child's second birthday to improve pregnancy outcomes, promote children's health and development, and to strengthen families' economic self-sufficiency. This program, currently underway in New York, Colorado, and Tennessee, appears

Go To Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic