Developmental Inflection Point for the Effect of Maternal Childhood Adversity on Offspring's Mental Health from Childhood to Adolescence: Time-Varying Effect of Gender Differences

Background and Purpose: Childhood adversities have a well-established dose–response relationship with later mental health. However, less attention has been given to intergenerational influences. Further, it is unknown how intergenerational influences intersect with offspring’s developmental stages and gender, leaving an untapped opportunity to reveal critical developmental periods for increasingly suggested multigenerational intervention strategies and to locate a subgroup of offspring with particularly heightened vulnerabilities.

The current prospective study focused on two central research aims. First, it tested maternal childhood adversity experiences on offspring’s mental health from ages 4.53 to 17 to examine fluctuations in intergenerational effects of maternal childhood adversity on offspring’s mental health over time. Second, we tested whether the developmental inflection point of the intergenerational influences differed by offspring’s gender.

Methods: Data were from the Young Women and Child Development Study (n = 361), a longitudinal study examining developmental outcomes of two cohorts of adolescent mothers and their offspring from ages 4.53 to 17. Maternal childhood adversity was measured with nine items assessing childhood exposure to maltreatment and household dysfunction. Offspring’s mental health was assessed using Child Behavioral Checklist. Covariates included gender, race, grandmother’s education, and cohort. Time-varying effect models (TVEMs) were employed to assess the time-varying relationship between maternal childhood adversity and offspring’s mental health using TVEM SAS macro. Moderation TVEMs by offspring’s gender were also evaluated.

Results: The intergenerational impact of maternal childhood adversity on internalizing problems increased from age 5 (b = 0.34, 95% CI = 0.03, 0.65) to age 8 or 9 (b = 0.75, 95% CI = 0.37, 1.13) and on externalizing problems from age 5 (b = 0.66, 95% CI = 0.10, 1.22) to age 8 (b = 0.87, 95% CI = 0.33, 1.41). Gender interaction TVEMs revealed that maternal childhood adversity was a statistically significant predictor of internalizing problems until age 10, regardless of offspring’s gender, and remained statistically significant for girls’ internalizing problems until age 16. For externalizing problems, maternal childhood adversity was a statistically significant predictor until age 14 for girls, whereas it was not significant at any point for boys. Such gender differences were particularly prominent from ages 11 (b = 0.68, 95% CI = 0.03, 1.32) to 14.7 (b = 0.89, 95% CI = 0.14, 1.65) for internalizing problems and ages 11 (b = 0.93, 95% CI = 0.02, 1.83) to 13.7 (b = 1.16, 95% CI = 0.11, 2.21) for externalizing problems.

Conclusions and Implications: Our findings reveal that ages 5 to 8, the period of transition into primary schools, may represent a developmental inflection point when the intergenerational influences of maternal childhood adversity start emerging substantially. Once elevated, the impacts of maternal childhood adversity on internalizing and externalizing problems remained steady, particularly for girls. Taken together, the current findings indicate that in addition to the current intervention focus on the prenatal period, social work efforts aiming to disrupt the intergenerational impacts of maternal childhood adversity should include the developmental period from ages 5 to 8 as an additional point of screening for maternal childhood adversity.