The Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) leadership are thrilled to announce FFCWS has received two grants through the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD) which will enable data collection with our focal children around the time of their 27th birthdays as well as data collection on child wellbeing and development in our study’s third generation!
FFCWS is a birth cohort study following a stratified, multistage, probability sample of children born in large US cities between 1998 and 2000. As such, it is the longest-running birth cohort study in the US based on a national probability sample. The study oversampled births to unmarried parents and is very diverse (46% Black, 24% Hispanic, 5% multiracial, 25% white or other), making the data a valuable resource for studying racial and economic disparities in health and wellbeing.
The FFCWS Year 27 core project will conduct new surveys with the original FFCWS focal children around their 27th birthdays, under the leadership of Dr. Kathryn Edin (PI), Dr. Jane Waldfogel (PI), and Dr. Anna Haskins (Co-I). This data collection will result in a comprehensive life course study from birth through young adulthood. We expect the data from the Year 27 surveys to bring about new insights and innovative research on health and wellbeing across the lifespan, and the intergenerational persistence of poverty and other forms of disadvantage.
The FFCWS Third Generation Children's Study (FFG3-Child) will be conducted under the leadership of Dr. Lawrence Berger (PI), Dr. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn (Co-I), Dr. Brenda Jones Harden (Co-I), Dr. Kathryn Neckerman (Co-I), and Dr. Julien Teitler (Co-I). The FFG3-Child Study will expand FFCWS to include data on the family and caregiving context, parenting (of mothers, biological fathers, and step/social fathers) and grandparenting behaviors, and child development at ages 3 and 5 for all (G3) children born to the female FFCWS focal children (G2 young adults). These data will support studies of intergenerational transmission of family context, economic resources, caregiving behaviors, and child development; whether associations of family context, economic resources, and caregiving behaviors with child development are consistent or differ across generations and whether there is heterogeneity in these patterns by child age, gender, and race/ethnicity. They will also support epigenetic analyses via DNA-based, sociodemographic, and environmental information on three generations, including prenatal, perinatal, and early childhood data on G2 and G3.