Overview

The Family Life Project was a multi-university program of research involving Penn State, the University of North Carolina, and New York University. The project was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for more than 10 years and sought to understand the development of critical child skills in both poor and non-poor young children growing up in rural areas characterized by high poverty. The project recruited a representative sample of every baby born to a mother who lived in one of six poor rural counties (3 in Pennsylvania and 3 in North Carolina) over one year, oversampling for poverty in both regions and African American children in North Carolina. An interdisciplinary team of investigators with expertise in a variety of important domains has been following these 1,292 children from birth with measurement of child, family, and school functioning yearly (e.g., emotional and behavioral regulation, executive functions, language, and academic achievement as well as social competence), observed mother and father sensitivity and language input in the home setting, observed quality of instruction in child care and elementary school, characteristics of the neighborhood/community, as well as biomarkers of child and maternal stress.