The objective of this study was to describe prevalent informal sources of information about sex and examine associations between informal sources of information about sex and sexual risk outcomes among sexually experienced adolescents. Work involved the secondary analysis of data from the Minnesota Student Survey, a statewide survey to monitor…

This study advances our understanding of fertility norms by examining whether fertility norms remain stable over time. In addition, this article also investigates whether these norms are influenced by (a) sociodemographic background characteristics; (b) fertility norms of close family members: partners, siblings, parents, and children; and (c)…

The extent and experiences of youths' caretaking of their adolescent sisters' children have been assessed in two longitudinal studies. The first study examines the caretaking patterns of 132 Latino and African American youth during middle and late adolescence. The second study involves 110 Latino youth whose teenage sister has recently given…

This article examines developmental trends in the rates of different kinds of victimization across the span of childhood. The Developmental Victimization Survey was a national telephone survey of the victimization experiences of 2,030 children from ages 2 to 17. The overall mean number of victimizations during a single year increased with age, as…

It has long been recognised that mature-aged sibling dyads provide each other with emotional support. What has yet to be determined is whether this support function is maintained within the baby boomer generational cohort of sibling dyads who through economic relocation/migration have become separated by distance. As such, this paper highlights…

Objective: Several studies have documented a profile of elevated scores on the Attention Problems, Aggressive Behavior and Anxious/Depressed scales of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) in youth with bipolar disorder. The sum of these scales, referred to as the CBCL Juvenile Bipolar Disorder (JBD) phenotype, has modest diagnostic utility, and…

Background: To model and compare contextual (area and family) effects on the psychopathology of children nested in families nested in areas. Method: Data from the first two sweeps of the UK's Millennium Cohort Study were used. The final study sample was 9,630 children clustered in 6,052 families clustered in 1,681 Lower-layer Super Output Areas.…

Background: Adolescent involvement in religious organizations has been hypothesized to protect against early age at first drink. However, the correlation between adolescent religiosity and later age at first drink may be confounded by environmental or genetic differences between families. This study tests whether, after controlling for shared…

This study examined developmental change and variation across social context in the quality of children's conversations, with a dual focus on (1) conflict and (2) inner state talk (IST). Each measure was coded as a proportion of total talk, using transcripts from 57 three- to six-year-olds, filmed at home at two time points (12 months apart) in…

This paper explores whether and in what ways young people's perceptions and experiences of higher education (HE) can facilitate the transmission within their social networks of social capital both upwardly (from child to parent) and horizontally (from sibling to sibling), and thus can potentially provide bridging capital to family members,…

In 2005, the first mother to be sentenced to jail because her eldest daughter persistently truanted was sentenced for a second time because she "failed" to stop her younger daughter from missing school. This story certainly exposes the links between education and punishment for working-class children and families, and the ways in which…

Sibling abuse has been studied much less extensively than other forms of family violence in the United States; moreover, research on how sibling abuse is viewed in different ethnic-minority groups has been rare. Convenience samples of Native American (n = 25), Latino/Hispanic (n = 45), African American (n = 30), European American (n = 78), Asian…

This study investigated a novel approach to obtaining data on parent and infant emotion during the Face-to-Face/Still-Face paradigm, and examined these data in light of previous findings regarding early autism risk. One-hundred and eighty eight non-expert students rated 38 parents and infant siblings of children who did (20) or did not (18) have…

Purpose: The present study had two purposes: provide an illustration of use of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Children's (CNLSY; U.S. Department of Labor, 2009) database and use the database to seek convergent evidence regarding the magnitude and significance of genetic effects influencing low and typical performers on measures of…

Twin studies are well known for their value in quantifying the contribution of genes to population variation in behaviors and personality traits. Twin studies also provide a unique opportunity to untangle the contribution of environmental experiences to emotional and behavioral development. This is particularly true when examining monozygotic (MZ)…