Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Lifecourse health research consistently demonstrates that children's early environments have significant and enduring consequences for children's social-emotional development and future mental health outcomes. Early stressors including socioeconomic disadvantage and unpredictable or consistently low adult responsiveness can change children's biological capabilities to respond to stress, and these capabilities can be passed down across generations. Secure attachment to a primary caregiver may be one way that exposures to early adversities can be overcome, putting children on healthier lifecourse trajectories and disrupting cycles of disadvantage and compromised mental health. This study investigates how early attachment is associated with intergenerational social-emotional outcomes for offspring in the context of varying socioeconomic circumstances. Two primary objectives are to: (1) examine how early infant-caregiver attachment across generations affects children's social-emotional health (psychosocial functioning and behaviour) as well as biological markers of stress (DNA methylation); and (2) evaluate whether data can be routinely collected during 18-month public health nurse visits to identify social and structural supports available within communities that can help improve infant-caregiver attachment for the overall purpose of optimizing child mental health outcomes. This research capitalizes on two unique data sets available through the Royal Children's Hospital and Deakin Centre for Social and Early Emotional Development in Melbourne, Australia. Objective 1 will be examined using data from the Australian Temperament Project Generation 3, a multigenerational cohort study spanning 3 generations. Objective 2 will be examined using the Toddler Development Instrument, a Canadian-developed survey collecting population-level data on children's early environments, community resources, and infant developmental milestones.