When more is not better: the role of cumulative risk in child behavior outcomes

Cumulative risk research has established the deleterious effects of co-occurring risk factors on child behavior outcomes. However, extant literature has not addressed potential differential effects of cumulative risk at different points in development and has left open questions about whether a threshold model or a linear risk model better describes the impact of cumulative risk on behavior outcomes. The current study examined the impact of cumulative risk factors (i.e., child maltreatment, inter-parental violence, family disruption, low socioeconomic status, and high parental stress) in early and middle childhood on child behavior outcomes in adolescence.

Using data from an ongoing longitudinal study of at-risk urban children (N=171), the cumulative effects of these five risk factors across early and middle childhood were investigated.