Social Disadvantage Gets Inside The Family: Exploring Biopsychosocial Family Processes in the Emergence of Developmental Health Inequalities

Children raised in socially disadvantaged settings often exhibit poorer developmental health in a variety of domains, including socioemotional, medical and cognitive functioning. This relationship appears to operate in part via a cascade linking poverty and cumulative environmental adversity to early biological risk and interpersonal family process. Moreover, these mechanisms are suggested to function over-and-above the direct effects of material investments in childrenâ s healthy development and wellbeing. Despite this knowledge, there remains a need for longitudinal developmental research examining the nature in which environmental risk in early life impacts multiple and distinct intermediary mechanisms that are manifest within the proximal family environment. In order to address this limitation, the present dissertation provides three separate empirical studies outlining the nature in which social disadvantage impacts family process (in the form of interpersonal sensitivity), and early biological risk (in the form of birth weight). Data for the present dissertation came from the Kids, Families and Places Study, which is a population-based prospective birth cohort of newborn infants and their families from Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario, Canada (N=501 families). The present dissertation demonstrates that social disadvantage (1) impacts cognitive functioning in a number of domains at the time of school entry via maternal sensitivity and material investments, (2) disrupts the receipt of cognitive sensitivity during family interactions across multiple dyads, particularly for younger siblings, and (3) simultaneously increases developmental risk for multiple siblings-per-family and tends to increase sibling differences in developmental experience. To conclude, implications for the study of developmental health and family science are discussed.Ph.D