While families, schools, communities and children’s service agencies are concerned about consequences of delinquency and drug abuse of young people, the Seattle Social Development Project (SSDP) is one of handful of longitudinal studies which has sought specifically to understand the influences and development of these problems.

Starting in 1981 as an experiment to test strategies for mitigating risks associated with to school failure, drug abuse and delinquency, more than a thousand children originally took part in the SSDP, half of whom received a range of risk-reducing interventions and half of whom did not. In 1985 over 800 children, then in the fifth grade, agreed to further participate in a longitudinal study to examine how the interplay between risk and protective factors played out over the course of their development and influenced subsequent delinquency, drug abuse, school failure and risky sexual behavior.

It is now 30 years since children entered the first grade and the study began. What have we learnt over these three decades? The SSDP has been pivotal in identifying risk factors for drug, alcohol and delinquency. The age at which children first engage in these acts, the norms within families and communities, and the degree of warmth and attachment to adults have all been demonstrated as powerful predictors of subsequent delinquent and criminal behavior and drug and alcohol abuse.

For example, the study has demonstrated that children exposed to violence in the home are more likely physically to bully other children. “Parents are very powerful role models and children will mimic the behavior of parents and want to be like them”, says pediatrician Nerissa Bauer who worked on the SSDP. “When parents engage in violence, children may assume violence is the right way to do things”.

Similarly, the study has found that those children who were violent during the mid to late teenage years were significantly more likely to commit forms of domestic violence against a partner at the age of 24 than those who did not engaged in violent behavior or had stopped by the age of 16.

Findings such as these, coupled with hundreds of academic papers resulting from the SSDP over the three decades to date, have provided empirical evidence supporting the social development theory proposed by David Hawkins and Richard Catalano. The theory states that that bonding to school, prosocial family members and peers, and clear standards and norms of behavior are critical to children’s positive development, and that all children need to be given the opportunities, skills and recognition to develop these. What emerges from the SSDP is a cohesive picture of those risk factors intrinsic to the child and those spanning family, school and neighborhood contexts, that increase the likelihood of children developing delinquent behavior, school failure or substance misuse, alongside a range of protective factors that may be promoted to mitigate these risks.

A more recent development of the SSDP has been to investigate the intergenerational influences of delinquency and drug abuse. The Intergenerational Project (as it is called) seeks to learn more about the links between generations and the influence of different parenting practices and family relationships on child development.

For example, Todd Herrenkohl, associate professor at the Social Development Research Group who has for many years worked on the SSDP, says: “Individuals who have a history of anti-social behavior may be more likely to find a partner with a similar history and re-create what they experienced as children. They may also be more likely to be in places in their communities where they interact with people with the same types of behavior”.

In a similar vein, the study has demonstrated how substance use may have lasting effects on three generations. “Children of smokers, heavy drinkers or marijuana users are more likely to have behavior problems when they are young, and consequently more likely to have drug problems themselves as they get old” says by Jennifer Bailey, research scientist at SDRG, “These children then grow up to adult substance users, whose kids have behavior problems and the cycle is repeated”.

The SSDP longitudinal study has, and will continue to make a huge contribution to our understanding of the relative importance risk and protective factors related to children’s behavioral and social development. It is these insights that form the bedrock of prevention and early intervention efforts to improve child outcomes.

Future studies by the SSDP will investigate influences from childhood and adolescence on subsequent mental health and substance misuse outcomes into adulthood and explore the interaction between children’s genetic make-up and their environmental context (GxE) on drug and alcohol addiction in later years.

Links: www.ssdp-tip.org