Upcoming Webinars

Featuring Kimberly A. Schonert-Reichl, PhD (Professor, Faculty of Education,and Director, Human Early Learning Partnership, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia), this webinar will provide background on the Middle Years Development Instrument (MDI) and its utility.   The MDI is a self-report questionnaire that asks children in middle childhood about their thoughts, feelings and experiences. The MDI is one of the first survey of its kind to gather information about the lives of children both in school, in the home and in the community, from their own perspective. The survey uses a strengths-based approach to assess five dimensions of child development that are strongly linked to social and emotional well-being, health, …

This webinar, part of the LCRN’s series based on the Handbook of Life Course Health Development, features Marco Del Giudice, PhD from the University of New Mexico.   Dr. Del Giudice is Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of New Mexico. His main research area is the evolutionary study of human development across the life span, with a focus on individual and sex differences and their neurobiological basis. He has published more than 60 papers and book chapters on a wide range of topics, from the biology of developmental plasticity to the classification of mental disorders in an evolutionary framework. With his collaborators he has advanced the …

This is one of 26 chapters published in the Handbook of Life Course Health Development.   Abstract: Middle childhood—conventionally going from about 6–11 years of age—is a crucial yet underappreciated phase of human development. On the surface, middle childhood may appear like a slow-motion interlude between the spectacular transformations of infancy and early childhood and those of adolescence. In reality, this life stage is anything but static: the transition from early to middle childhood heralds a global shift in cognition, motivation, and social behavior, with profound and wide-ranging implications for the development of personality, sex differences, and even psychopathology. In the last two decades, converging theories and findings from anthropology, primatology, …

Summary   Background Rapid weight gain in infancy has been established as a risk factor for the development of later obesity.   Objective We aimed to investigate the role of changes in infant body composition (assessed via total body electrical conductivity) on the development of overweight/obesity in mid-childhood.   Methods Fifty-three term infants were evaluated at birth, three times during infancy and in mid-childhood. Logistic regression was used to determine associations between rates of total weight gain, fat mass gain and lean mass gain during infancy and later overweight/obesity (defined as body mass index [BMI] ≥85th percentile), adjusted for birth weight and parent education.   Results At follow-up (age 9.0 ± 1.8 …

To date, life course research in maternal and child health has largely focused on elucidating fetal and early life influences on adult health and less on promoting the health of children with special health care needs (CSHCN). Consideration of life course theory (LCT) for CSHCN is especially important given their increasing prevalence and comorbidity, their disproportionate vulnerability to weaknesses or instability in the health care system, and the growing evidence linking child and adult health and quality of life. In this commentary we seek to advance the consideration of LCT for CSHCN. We (1) briefly summarize key issues and the importance of a life course approach for CSHCN; (2) present …

Great Britain has a unique collection of studies in which people have been followed from birth into early old age. There are at present four of these Birth Cohort Studies, made up of people born in 1946, 1958, 1970 and 2000. The members of the 1946 and 1958 cohorts have generously allowed researchers to take a lot of biological health measures, as well as answering questions about their families, education, work, relationships and mental health. To these studies may be added others which have not followed people from birth, but which have measured changes in life circumstances and biology over many years. This booklet summarises some of the work that …

Recognizing the utility of a life course perspective, this special issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health examines the impact of experience in shaping brain and behavior from the prenatal period through adolescence. This issue is based on a conference, “Stress and the Brain: Implications for Health, Development and Learning,” held at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in April 2011. It was a collaboration of the Schools of Education and Public Health and was sponsored by the Carol and Eugene Ludwig Fund. The conference brought together a multidisciplinary group of experts to consider the role of stress, adversity, and experience broadly defined, during the prenatal, childhood, and …

There is increasing interest in discovering mechanisms that mediate the effects of childhood stress on late-life disease morbidity and mortality. Previous studies have suggested one potential mechanism linking stress to cellular aging, disease and mortality in humans: telomere erosion. We examined telomere erosion in relation to children’s exposure to violence, a salient early-life stressor, which has known long-term consequences for well-being and is a major public-health and social-welfare problem. Compared with their counterparts, the children who experienced two or more kinds of violence exposure showed significantly more telomere erosion between age-5 baseline and age-10 follow-up measurements, even after adjusting for sex, socioeconomic status and body mass index. This finding provides …