Parenting Across Cultures

The Parenting Across Culture (PAC) Study (R01HD054805) has followed a culturally diverse cohort of 1,417 8-year-old boys and girls and their parents across nine countries for the last 16 years to examine trajectories of risk-taking behaviors from childhood to early adulthood and how these behaviors are mediated by biological, social-psychological, and familial processes. Three new developments on this project include (1) an NICHD administrative supplement to add COVID-19-related questions to the PAC Study annual interview battery and assessing COVID-related experiences at three additional time points each year from 2020-2022 to examine behavioral and emotional functioning in relation to the rapidly-evolving situation in each country's response to the pandemic; (2) the completion of a collection of biomarkers on the U.S. sample of the PAC study, funded by a P2C seed grant, that is being analyzed for stress response and genetic markers associated with mental health problems and self-regulation in order to examine how the association between parenting behaviors and offspring’s risk taking behaviors in the transition to adulthood are mediated by biosocial factors, and whether this mediating role is moderated by cultural normativeness of parenting; and (3) a competitive renewal of the RO1 to enable five additional years of data collection to inform scientific understanding of predictors of adjustment during early adulthood, a developmental period characterized by high morbidity and mortality due to mental health problems, substance use, and other largely preventable causes, as well as opportunities for positive adaptation.