What factors influence how children develop?
That’s the question the Family Life Project study is trying to answer. The group will be spending years with local children and their families to better understand the process.
The study, which began in November 2002, is spearheaded by the FPG Child Development Institute based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Penn State. They are conducting the largest study to date on how rural life affects the way a child grows.
The Family Life Project has been following families living in two of the four major geographical areas of high child rural poverty in the U.S. – the African-American South and Appalachia.
Included in the study are Cambria, Blair and Huntington counties and three counties in eastern North Carolina.
For reasons of confidentiality – and the risk of compromising the study – names of the children and families participating are not released.
“There has never been a study on what issues families and schools face in rural American,” said Mark Greenberg, director of the study at Penn State. “We are looking at two states and following these children since they were born.”
Researchers have been going into 1,200 homes and observing what community characteristics affect families and children’s lives.
“We look at the parenting children are receiving, family stability, jobs the parents hold and poverty levels,” Greenberg said. “
All these factors have influences on how kids develop as infants and toddlers.”
As phase one of the study was coming to end, the FPG Child Development Institute received a $12.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue on with the study. The grant is for five years.
Although Greenberg said it still is too early to draw many conclusions, researchers have found that language skills are strongly impacted by the way the family interacts and talks to each other.
“We’re finding that families without work are less likely to have good parenting skills, and people’s stability in rural areas influences development,” he said.
Greenberg believes because of the importance of the study, more grant money will be awarded to track these children through their teen years.
“This has the potential to be a landmark American study for development,” he said.
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