No abstract

This study examined the developmental cascade of both genetic and environmental influences on toddlers’ behavior problems through the longitudinal and multi-generational assessment of psychosocial risk. We used data from the Early Growth and Development Study, a prospective adoption study, to test the intergenerational transmission of risk through the assessment of adoptive mother, adoptive father, and biological parent depressive symptoms on toddler behavior problems. Given that depression is often chronic, we control for across-time continuity and find that in addition to associations between adoptive mother depressive symptoms and toddler externalizing problems, adoptive father depressive symptoms when the child is 9-months of age were associated with toddler problems and associated with maternal depressive symptoms. Findings also indicated that a genetic effect may indirectly influence toddler problems through prenatal pregnancy risk. These findings help to describe how multiple generations are linked through genetic (biological parent), timing (developmental age of the child), and contextual (marital partner) pathways.

Emotional instability and poor emotional awareness are cardinal features of the emotional dysregulation associated with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Most models of the development of BPD include child negative emotional reactivity and grossly inadequate caregiving (e.g., abuse, emotional invalidation) as major contributing factors. However, early childhood emotional reactivity and exposure to adverse family situations are associated with a diverse range of long-term outcomes. We examine the known effects of these risk factors on early childhood emotional functioning and their potential links to the emergence of chronic emotional instability and poor emotional awareness. This examination leads us to advocate new research directions. First, we advocate for enriching the developmental assessment of children's emotional functioning to more closely capture clinically relevant aspects. Second, we advocate for conceptualizing children's early family experiences in terms of the proximal emotional environment to which young children may be or become sensitive. Such approaches should contribute to our ability to identify risk for BPD and guide preventive intervention.