External Publications Using GUI Data

Background
We examined the role of neighbourhood characteristics in explaining socioeconomic inequalities in child mental health in Ireland.Methods: Data from Cohort ’08 of Growing Up in Ireland with Wave 3 (age 5) as the baseline and Wave 5 (age 9) as the follow-up (n=8,373 for cross-sectional and n=6,349 for longitudinal analyses) were used. Socioeconomic status (SES) indicators were caregiver education, occupation, and equivalised household income. Caregiver and teacher reports of total difficulties score (TDS) from the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire were combined with a higher score indicating more mental health difficulties. Twenty neighbourhood items rated by caregivers were grouped into five domains (neighbourhood safety, built environments, cohesion, interaction, and disorder) using exploratory factor analysis. We used linear regression to assess the associations between SES indicators, neighbourhood characteristics, and TDS, controlling for sociodemographic covariates. Mediation analysis informed the extent to which (%) neighbourhood domains explained the SES-TDS associations. Network psychometric analysis was used to identify neighbourhood items that were most strongly linked to TDS.Results: Lower SES was consistently associated with a higher baseline, follow-up TDS, and longitudinal changes in TDS. Favourable neighbourhood domains (higher safety, cohesion, interaction, lower disorder) were associated with lower baseline and follow-up TDS. Neighbourhood safety, cohesion, and disorder were also associated with longitudinal changes in TDS across waves. Four neighbourhood domains (except built environments) explained the associations between SES and baseline and follow-up TDS by 3% to 18% in separate single mediation models, and these four domains in concert explained 12% to 23% in multiple mediation models. Built environments domain predicted TDS and mediated the associations between SES and baseline TDS (5% to 11%) in urban children only. No mediation of the associations between SES and longitudinal changes in TDS by neighbourhood domains was observed. Findings from network analysis indicated that specific concerns over “people being drunk or taking drugs in public” and whether “this is a safe neighbourhood” may act as key conceptual bridges between neighbourhood characteristics and TDS.

Conclusions
Neighbourhood characteristics may explain cross-sectional socioeconomic inequalities in child mental health. Improving neighbourhood characteristics where lower-SES children live may be important to reduce SES-based inequalities in child mental health.

This paper discusses the role of grandparents in informal childcare in Ireland. It considers how recent demographic change and government policy on childcare have the potential to place greater pressures on the provision of grandparent childcare. It illustrates research literature that has examined the prevalence and intensity of grandparent care, factors influencing such care, and the role and needs of grandparents in childcare. We argue that there are significant gaps in Irish research evidence about the extent of, role and needs of grandparents as childcarers and outline a data and research agenda that builds on previous research in this area.

Keywords
Childcare, Policy, Grandparents, Intergenerational

Objective
Childhood chronic illness can have a high impact on the child’s quality of life. The foundations of health are established in early life, and are shaped by biological, psychosocial, spiritual and environmental processes and influences. The objectives of this presentation are twofold: firstly to describe the prevalence of chronic illness in 9-year-olds in Ireland, secondly to illustrate how chronic illness influences the psychological and social development of the children.

Methods
Analysis was based on data of 8570 9-year old children, and their families who participated in Growing Up in Ireland—the National Longitudinal Study of Children. The sample was generated through the primary school system. A representative sample of 910 schools participated; the sample of children and their families was randomly selected from within the schools. Questionnaires were administered in schools; and after completion of this phase, the project interviewers visited the families of the 9-year olds in their homes and administered core questionnaires to the Study Child and his/her carers who provided either home-based or centre-based care on a regular basis.

Results
The overall prevalence of chronic illness reported by mothers among the 9-year old cohort was 11% (gender-specific prevalence for boys: 13%, and significantly lower for girls: 10%). Respiratory illnesses accounted for almost half (46%) of all chronic illnesses, followed by mental and behavioural conditions with 19% (high gender dysbalance: reported for boys in 24%, for girls in 12%). Children with a reported chronic illness had significantly more emotional, conduct, hyperactivity, peer-based and prosocial difficulties when compared with children without a reported chronic illness. Abnormal scores, based on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire were found in 20% in children with a chronic disease, and in 5.5% in children without a chronic disease. Socio-economic Status was associated with poorer health outcomes. Furthermore, primary care givers’ views and perceptions regarding the chronic illness of the child were found to be a significant factor on child strengths and difficulties in a multivariate model.

Conclusions
The majority of 9-year old children can be assessed as healthy. The most common chronic illness in this large cohort was respiratory disease and overall, chronic conditions were found to have a negative impact on the child’s emotional and social state.

The relationship between parental background and children’s educational outcomes has been a dominant theme within the sociology of education. There has been an on-going debate as to the relative merits of explanations which focus on the role of socio-cultural reproduction and those which focus on rational choice. However, many empirical studies within the social stratification tradition fail to allow for children’s own agency in shaping the relationship between social background and schooling outcomes. This paper draws on the first wave of a large-scale longitudinal study of over 8,000 nine-year-old children in Ireland, which combines information from parents, school principals, teachers and children themselves. Both social class and parental education are found to have significant effects on reading and mathematics test scores among nine year olds. These effects are partly mediated by home-based educational resources and activities, parents’ educational expectations for their child, and parents’ formal involvement in the school. More importantly, children’s own engagement with, and attitudes to, school significantly influence their academic performance. The influence of children’s own attitudes and actions can thus reinforce or mitigate the effect of social background factors. The analysis therefore provides a bridge between the large body of research on the intergenerational transmission of inequality and the emerging research and policy literature on children’s rights.

The increasing emphasis on inclusive education internationally has broadened the definition of special educational needs (SEN) and greatly affected national prevalence estimates. In line with these international trends, in Ireland the EPSEN Act (2004) defines SEN as any “restriction in the capacity of a person to participate in or benefit from education”. Taking this broad definition, this study draws on the first longitudinal study of children in Ireland, Growing Up in Ireland, to generate a new estimate of SEN prevalence among Irish nine-year-old children. The analysis combines detailed information, collected from parents and teachers, encompassing diverse types of SEN, including physical disabilities, speech impairments, learning disabilities and emotional/behavioural difficulties. In doing so, the study establishes a SEN prevalence rate of 25 per cent among children in the mid-primary years, a rate very much in line with recent research in other European contexts. Additionally, the study details the diversity of data collected on children and young people with SEN and disabilities across agencies and government departments, the potential value of this data and directions for improved learner databases.

This retrospective cross-sectional paper examines the relationship between early breastfeeding exposure and children’s academic test scores at nine years of age independent of a wide range of possible confounders. The final sample comprised 8226 nine-year-old school children participating in the first wave of the Growing Up in Ireland study. The children were selected through the Irish national school system using a 2-stage sampling method and were representative of the nine-year population. Information relating to breastfeeding initiation and exposure duration was obtained retrospectively at nine years of age via parental recall and children’s academic performance was assessed using standardised reading and mathematics tests. Hierarchical linear regression analysis with robust standard errors to control for clustering at the school level was used to quantify the effect of breastfeeding on children’s test scores. Propensity score matching was used to compare treatment effects across groups defined by their propensity to breastfeed. In unadjusted analysis, children who were breastfed scored 8.67 percentage points higher on reading and 7.42 percentage points higher on mathematics compared to those who were never breastfed. While the breastfeeding advantage attenuated appreciably when adjusted for a range of child, maternal, socio-economic and socio-environmental characteristics, children who were breastfed continued to enjoy a significant test score advantage of 3.24 (p < 0.001) and 2.23 (p < 0.001) percentage points on reading and mathematics respectively compared to those who were never breastfed. Any amount of breastfeeding was associated with significantly higher test scores than no exposure, but evidence of a dose-response relationship was weak. The results of the propensity score matching analysis indicated that the test score advantage of breastfed children is robust and that the magnitude of the effect varies across groups defined by their propensity to breastfeed, being largest amongst the most socially disadvantaged and falling to near zero among the most advantaged group.

Parent-child interactions are influenced by factors outside the immediate family. A recent paper † based on data from the Growing Up in Ireland study (GUI) focuses in particular on the support provided by grandparents in caring for very young children. Such support can have important direct and indirect influences on child development. For example, a grandparent who babysits a young child while parents have a night out has a direct interaction with the child in the context of providing care. However, there is also an indirect influence in the context of supporting the mother-father relationship which, in turn, could be expected to affect (positively) parental interactions with the child.

The transition to parenthood and early infancy have been identified in the literature as the critical periods requiring most support. Infancy is a particularly intensive parenting period. Children at this stage remain highly dependent on caregivers for their basic needs but, by 9 months (the age of infants at the time of data collection in the GUI study), they are also starting to become more mobile and interaction-seeking. In the Irish context, 9 months may also be the stage when mothers may be contemplating a return to work or education following maternity leave (paid and unpaid) – and those who have been breastfeeding will likely have finished at least exclusive breastfeeding.

Here we report some key results from the paper; further detail, and a full set of references to the literature can be found in the paper itself.

This study reports recent trends in periconceptional folic acid use in Ireland using archived data from Growing Up in Ireland – the National Longitudinal Study of Children. Of a sample of 10,891 mothers, 6,936 (64%) reported taking folic acid before conception and 10,157 (93%) reported taking folic acid during the first trimester of pregnancy. Younger (OR=0.38, 95% CI=0.29-0.50), lower income (OR=0.59, 95% CI=0.51-0.68), lower educated (OR=0.77, 95% CI=0.66-0.89), and single mothers (OR=0.46, 95% CI=0.40-0.52) were less likely to have taken folic acid pre-conception. A similar pattern was found post-conception with younger (OR=0.58, 95% CI=0.40-0.84), lower income (OR=0.40, 95% CI=0.30-0.53), lower educated (OR=0.50, 95% CI=0.38-0.66), and single mothers (OR=0.74, 95% CI=0.60-0.91) less likely to have taken folic acid post-conception. The findings highlight an ongoing need for targeted promotional campaigns to increase supplementation rates among younger and socially disadvantaged mothers.

Parenting style has been highlighted as an important factor in child and adolescent outcomes for a range of indicators including health and educational achievement. The fostering of a positive self-concept and closer parental monitoring of school involvement are two of the suggested mechanisms by which parenting style may affect educational achievement. In recent years, much research has tended to focus on adolescents and there is considerably less information for middle childhood. This paper looks at the role of maternal parenting style (based on child-reports) on academic achievement for a large sample of 9-year-old children who took part in the Growing Up in Ireland study. It shows that an authoritative parenting style was associated with higher scores on measures of reading and maths relative to neglectful or uninvolved styles, however the expected advantage over an authoritarian parenting style did not emerge (and tended to reverse post-adjustment for mediators), and other socio-demographic characteristics such as maternal education were stronger predictors. Adjustments for possible mediating variables had a complex effect on the earlier models and suggest that authoritative parenting may have an indirect effect through both parental monitoring and the promotion of positive self-concept, especially the latter.

Keywords
parenting style, academic achievement, middle childhood, self-concept

This study is based on the first wave of data on the child cohort (nine year-olds) in the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) survey. It examines family relationships and their associations with parent and child well-being in the families of the nine year-olds and explores social inequalities in these aspects of family circumstances. The analysis is presented under five headings: the structure of families (a term which encompasses family structure both currently and over time and also includes family size), relationship quality between parents, the individual well-being of parents, relationship quality between parents and children, and the well-being of children.

Although an increasing proportion of people in Ireland are living in stepfamilies, little research has explored the dynamics within these families. Drawing on data from the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) study (9-year-old cohort), this paper aims to compare family processes within stepmother (n=89) and stepfather families (n=295). No stepfathers were primary caregivers to their stepchild(ren), whereas stepmothers tended to assume this role. Stepmothers were less romantically happy than either stepfathers or biological mothers in stepfather families and experienced more interparental conflict than stepfathers. They also had less close and more conflicted relationships with their stepchild(ren) than mothers in stepfather families. These findings are in line with previous research and point to the applicability of international research to stepfamilies in Ireland. The findings suggest that stepmother families may face particular challenges and may benefit from parenting and relationship support.

This study examined whether being breastfed predicts handedness. Two large representative samples from Britain (n=13,421) and Ireland (n=8,426) were used. Multivariate probit models are estimated, reporting the marginal effects of covariates on the probability of a child being right-handed. For both datasets, children who have been breastfed for a minimum period (between 1 month and 6 weeks) are significantly less likely to be left-handed. The results are robust to a variety of controls. Hence breastfeeding is an environmental factor that predicts handedness in a non-linear way, although the mechanism is unknown.

Keywords: Breastfeeding; Lactation;b Handedness; Laterality

Background
Parental obesity is a predominant risk factor for childhood obesity. Family factors including socio-economic status (SES) play a role in determining parent weight. It is essential to unpick how shared family factors impact on child weight. This study aims to investigate the association between measured parent weight status, familial socio-economic factors and the risk of childhood obesity at age 9.

Methodology/Principal Findings
Cross sectional analysis of the first wave (2008) of the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) study. GUI is a nationally representative study of 9-year-old children (N = 8,568). Schools were selected from the national total (response rate 82%) and age eligible children (response rate 57%) were invited to participate. Children and their parents had height and weight measurements taken using standard methods. Data were reweighted to account for the sampling design. Childhood overweight and obesity prevalence were calculated using International Obesity Taskforce definitions. Multinomial logistic regression examined the association between parent weight status, indicators of SES and child weight. Overall, 25% of children were either overweight (19.3%) or obese (6.6%). Parental obesity was a significant predictor of child obesity. Of children with normal weight parents, 14.4% were overweight or obese whereas 46.2% of children with obese parents were overweight or obese. Maternal education and household class were more consistently associated with a child being in a higher body mass index category than household income. Adjusted regression indicated that female gender, one parent family type, lower maternal education, lower household class and a heavier parent weight status significantly increased the odds of childhood obesity.

Conclusions/Significance
Parental weight appears to be the most influential factor driving the childhood obesity epidemic in Ireland and is an independent predictor of child obesity across SES groups. Due to the high prevalence of obesity in parents and children, population based interventions are required.