Jenkins – kids, families and places

That’s a study that I started with Mike Boyle back in 2004 and the goal of that study was really to look at the macro environment of kids, so things like their neighbourhoods, children’s experience of poverty, the micro environment, which would be the family environment, so the relationships between parents and kids and siblings and target children, and children’s socio-emotional development, so we’re really interested in how kids come to regulate their emotions and all of the influences that are part of that development, so you know if we think of kids going from something like the terrible two’s when they’re very angry and distressed to the age of four when they’d be able to talk about what’s going on for them, they’d be able to regulate their anger much better. So it’s those kinds of, we’re saying what are the influences on kids that are contextual coming from either their macro environment or their close environment of their relationships and how do those interact with individual developmental challenges of children to explain how that emotion and social regulation occurs.  

It’s a multi-level study looking at these different aspects of influences on kids, and we go right from the neighbourhood, to the family, and we also look at the biology of individual children because I think what we know a lot about is that kids are individually vulnerable, so environments do not work the same on all children. If you have a parent who loses their temper very easily, that for some kids in the family that’s not going to be a problem and for other children that’s going to be a large problem and it’s going to influence their development. So it’s really looking at those contingent influences on children and how those risks at different levels operate together.  

We have data on them at when they were born and we include all the older siblings in our studies so that’s why, how we can get these sibling influences on kids. So we have data on the children when they’re at the time of birth, we look at them at 18 moths, then their older siblings at 18 months. We look at them again when the target child is three years old and the older siblings are anywhere up to about seven or eight years old. So we’re tracking at these different stages. We’ve done three waves of data collection and we’re just completing our fourth, and that’s the point at which we’ll really be able to look at our trajectories of children.