Childrearing Violence and Child Adjustment After Exposure to Kenyan Post-election Violence

Objective: This study examines parents’ and children’s exposure to short-term political violence and the relation between childrearing violence and child adjustment after widespread violence that erupted in Kisumu, Kenya after the disputed presidential election in December 2007. Method: Mothers of 100 Luo children (mean age 8.46 years, 61% female) reported on their own use of childrearing violence at Time 1, approximately 4 months after the disputed election, and again at Times 2 (n 95) and 3 (n 95), approximately 12 and 24 months later, respectively. At Time 2, mothers reported about post-election violence directed at them and about their children’s exposure to post-election violence. Children reported about their own externalizing behaviors at Times 1, 2, and 3. Results: Children’s exposure to post-election violence was related to Time 2 externalizing behavior, and childrearing violence at Time 1 predicted child externalizing behavior at Time 2. Exposure to post-election violence was not directly related to either childrearing violence or children’s externalizing behavior by Time 3, although children’s externalizing at Time 2 predicted more childrearing violence at Time 3. Conclusion: These results support earlier work that links childrearing violence and children’s exposure to political violence with increases in child externalizing behavior, but examined these links in the understudied area of short-term political violence. Even though sudden and severe political violence may subside significantly in weeks or months, increased attention to long-term effects on parenting and child adjustment is warranted

The importance of international collaborative research for advancing understanding of child and youth development

International collaborative research has the potential to advance developmental psychology in important ways. When basic science is conducted only in high-income, Western countries, the experiences of children and youth in these countries end up defining what is known about development. Young people adapt to the circumstances in which they live, so to understand development fully, research must be conducted in the range of cultural contexts in which development occurs. International collaborations, collecting data in a wide range of countries, and incorporating diverse cultural perspectives are central to this effort. This article outlines seven recommendations for researchers conducting collaborative international research on child and youth development. The recommendations address conceptual and methodological issues (avoiding a deficit perspective, rethinking ideas about standard or so-called "normative" development patterns, considering relations between age and development, and attending to comparability of samples and measures) and issues related to researchers themselves (collaborating with scholars and community members from other cultures, being strategic with potential collaborators and research participants, and communicating in person). © 2018 American Psychological Association

CHRM2, parental monitoring, and adolescent externalizing behavior: eidence for gene-environment interaction

Psychologists, with their long-standing tradition of studying mechanistic processes, can make important contributions to further characterizing the risk associated with genes identified as influencing risk for psychiatric disorders. We report one such effort with respect to CHRM2, which codes for the cholinergic muscarinic 2 receptor and was of interest originally for its association with alcohol dependence. We tested for association between CHRM2 and prospectively measured externalizing behavior in a longitudinal, community-based sample of adolescents, as well as for moderation of this association by parental monitoring. We found evidence for an interaction in which the association between the genotype and externalizing behavior was stronger in environments with lower parental monitoring. There was also suggestion of a crossover effect, in which the genotype associated with the highest levels of externalizing behavior under low parental monitoring had the lowest levels of externalizing behavior at the extreme high end of parental monitoring. The difficulties involved in distinguishing mechanisms of gene-environment interaction are discussed