The family environment, with all its complexity and diverse components, plays a critical role in shaping neurodevelopmental outcomes in children. Herein we review several domains of the family environment (family socioeconomic status, family composition and home environment, parenting behaviors and interaction styles, parental mental health and functioning, and parental substance use) and discuss how these domains influence neurodevelopment, with particular emphasis on mental health outcomes. We also highlight a new initiative launched by the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) program. We discuss the role that ECHO will play in advancing our understanding of the impact of the family environment on children's risk for psychiatric outcomes. Lastly, we conclude with important unanswered questions and controversies in this area of research, highlighting how ECHO will contribute to resolving these gaps in our understanding, clarifying relationships between the family environment and children's mental health.

Despite evidence for the importance of individual differences in expressive language during toddlerhood in predicting later literacy skills, few researchers have examined individual and contextual factors related to language abilities across the toddler years. Furthermore, a gap remains in the literature about the extent to which the relations of negative emotions and parenting to language skills may differ for girls and boys. The purpose of this longitudinal study was to investigate the associations among maternal sensitivity, children’s observed anger reactivity, and expressive language when children were 18 (T1; n = 247) and 30 (T2; n = 216) months. At each age, mothers reported on their toddlers’ expressive language, and mothers’ sensitive parenting behavior was observed during an unstructured free-play task. Toddlers’ anger expressions were observed during an emotion-eliciting task. Using path modeling, results showed few relations at T1. At T2, maternal sensitivity was negatively related to anger, and in turn, anger was associated with lower language skills. However, moderation analyses showed that these findings were significant for boys but not for girls. In addition, T1 maternal sensitivity and anger positively predicted expressive language longitudinally for both sexes. Findings suggest that the relations between maternal sensitivity, anger reactivity and expressive language may vary depending on the child’s developmental stage and sex.

The current study aimed to extend the results of White et al. (2015) by examining the moderating role of attention biases at age 5 on the relations between Behavioral Inhibition (BI) during toddlerhood and anxiety symptoms at age 10. Children’s BI at 2 and 3 years of age was measured using laboratory assessments, and attention bias towards threat was assessed using a dot-probe task at age 5. Latent Class Analysis (LCA) was used to identify the probability for children’s membership in an anxiety class, which reflected primary anxiety at age 10 that was not comorbid with symptoms of inattention. Maternal and self-report measures of children’s mental health, collected via questionnaires and semi-structured diagnostic interviews, were used as indicators for the LCA. The results revealed that threat-related attention biases moderated the relation between BI and anxiety, such that BI positively predicted the probability of being in the anxiety class only when children had an attention bias towards threat. BI was unrelated to anxiety when children had no attention bias or an attention bias away from threat. These results indicated that attention biases during preschool may differentiate between inhibited children who are at heightened risk for anxiety later in childhood from those who are not. The results are discussed in a framework detailing the role of attention biases in increasing the sensitivity for anxiety-related problems in children who display high levels of BI during early childhood.

The current study examined whether an important temperamental characteristic, effortful control (EC), moderates the associations between dispositional anger and sadness, attention biases, and social functioning in a group of preschool-aged children (N = 77). Preschoolers' attentional biases toward angry and sad facial expressions were assessed using eye-tracking, and we obtained teachers' reports of children's temperament and social functioning. Associations of dispositional anger and sadness with time looking at relevant negative emotional stimuli were moderated by children's EC, but relations between time looking at emotional faces and indicators of social functioning, for the most part, were direct and not moderated by EC. In particular, time looking at angry faces (and low EC) predicted high levels of aggressive behaviors, whereas longer time looking at sad faces (and high EC) predicted higher social competence. Finally, latency to detect angry faces predicted aggressive behavior under conditions of average and low levels of EC. Findings are discussed in terms of the importance of differentiating between components of attention biases toward distinct negative emotions, and implications for attention training. (PsycINFO Database Record

Background: The Ages and Stages Questionnaires-Third Edition (ASQ-3) is a parentcompleted screening to identify young children at-risk for developmental delays in the United States and internationally. Federal programs operating on Navajo Nation use the ASQ-3 to determine the need for early intervention services, even though the ASQ-3 national sample used to establish cutoff scores for referral included only 1% Native American children.Objectives: The current study aimed to compare the ASQ-3 results from a sample of Navajo infants to those from a representative national U.S. sample and to examine the specificity and sensitivity of the ASQ-3 in Navajo population. Methods:The sample included 530 Navajo infants (47.3% males) aged between 1 and 13 months who lived in remote and rural areas across the Navajo Nation.Children's development was assessed during home visits at 2-, 6-, 9-, and 12-month assessment windows.Results: Results showed that after 6 months, Navajo children had lower mean scores and higher percentages of children at-risk for developmental delays than those from the national sample. The sensitivities and specificities, estimated using a Bayesian diagnostic approach under both conservative and nonconservative prior range choices, suggested a comparable validity performance to that from other ASQ-3 studies.Discussion: The results of this study along with our ongoing comprehensive assessments at 4 years of age inform current programs working with Navajo children to improve early identification of developmental delays.

The mediating and moderating roles of self-regulation in the associations of dispositional anger and fear to later conduct and anxiety symptoms were tested. Mothers and teachers rated children’s anger and fear at 54 months (N = 191), and mothers reported on children’s symptoms of anxiety and conduct disorders at 72 and 84 months (Ns = 169 and 144). Children’s self-regulatory ability was assessed using the Tower of Hanoi task at 72 months. Children’s self-regulation mediated the association between early dispositional fear and 84-month mother-reported anxiety disorder symptoms above and beyond the effects of earlier generalized anxiety symptoms. Children’s anger directly predicted relatively high mother-reported conduct and anxiety disorder symptoms. Findings are discussed in terms of the importance of considering self-regulation as potential mechanism relating early childhood dispositional reactivity to later psychopathology symptoms.

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