Youth programs designed to prevent drug use and delinquency and support healthy development can reap lasting benefits not only for participants, but also for their future kids, according to a decades-long study by the University of Colorado and the 天美影视传媒.

The research focuses on a program called Raising Healthy Children, which the UW鈥檚 monitored in several Seattle elementary schools in the 1980s. The program was among the first to test the idea that problem behaviors could be prevented with specialized training for teachers, parents and young children.

Lead author , a professor of psychology and neuroscience at CU Boulder and director of the , first got involved with the study while a professor at the UW.

鈥淭his is the first published study to show that a broadly implemented, early childhood prevention program can have positive effects on the next generation,鈥� said Hill. 聽“Previous studies have shown that childhood interventions can demonstrate benefits well into adulthood. These results show that benefits may extend into the next generation as well.”

The , part of a longitudinal study known as the Seattle Social Development Project, is published June 8 in JAMA Pediatrics.

For the study, researchers assessed children whose parents had participated in , created by UW social work professors聽听补苍诲听, founders of the Social Development Research Group. 聽聽The lessons, for use by parents and teachers, focused on enhancing children鈥檚 opportunities for forming healthy bonds in grades 1 through 6 and providing them with social skills and reinforcements.聽Set in 18 public elementary schools in Seattle, the program was among the first to test the idea that problem behaviors could be prevented with specialized training for teachers, parents and young children.

鈥淭eachers were taught how to better manage their classrooms, parents were taught to better manage their families, and kids were taught how to better manage their emotions and decision making,鈥� said Hill.

Previous studies have shown that by age 18 those who had gone through the program demonstrated better academic achievement than non-participants and were less likely to engage in violence, substance use or unsafe sex. By their 30s, they had gone further in school, tended to be better off financially, and scored better on mental health assessments.

Beginning in 2002, the researchers started following the first-born children of program participants via questionnaires for their teachers and parents. Beginning when the children were 6 years old, they also conducted annual interviews.

A total of 182 kids were studied for the new paper, including 72 whose parents had gone through the program and 110 whose parents had not.

Those whose parents had participated in Raising Healthy Children had fewer developmental delays in the first five years of life, fewer behavior problems, fewer symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder 鈥� or ADHD 鈥� and better cognitive, academic and emotional maturity in the classroom. They were also significantly less likely to report using drugs or alcohol as a teenager.

鈥淲e already know that if you can prevent kids from getting involved in the criminal justice system, engaging in underage drinking and drug use, and experiencing depression and anxiety, you can save governments and families a lot of money,鈥� said co-author , assistant director of the Social Development Research Group at the UW. 鈥淥ur results suggest these programs, by delivering cross-generational effects, may be working even better than we thought.鈥�

Children whose parents had gone through the program in the 1980s also showed less 鈥渙ppositional defiance鈥� and 鈥渆xternalizing behaviors鈥� 鈥� two common precursors to serious violence later in life 鈥� said Hill. This suggests such interventions could play a role in stemming the tide of school violence.

The researchers caution that the study was a non-randomized controlled trial conducted in only one region of the country, and needs to be replicated before broad conclusions can be drawn. But amid a pandemic, when youth depression and anxiety are on the rise while budgets are being slashed and lawmakers may have a tendency to place prevention at a lower priority, Hill hopes the findings send a message.

鈥淏y investing in kids now and continuing to invest in them, we could be making generations to come more resilient for when the next national emergency comes around,鈥� said Hill.

The study was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. In addition to Hawkins and Catalano, co-authors from the UW Social Development Research Group are principal investigator and project director . Additional authors were , an emeritus professor in the UW College of Education, and Christine Steeger of the University of Colorado.

For more information, contact Bailey at jabailey@uw.edu or Hill at karl.hill@colorado.edu.

Adapted from a University of Colorado news release.

What defines a 鈥済ood life鈥� in your 30s?

The exact answer probably depends on the person, but most people could agree on some general themes: good physical and mental health, solid relationships, and a steady job or good education. Being financially responsible and involvement in your community or civic life also help make life better.

Now 天美影视传媒 researchers have found that that 鈥済ood life鈥� in adulthood can start in grade school, by teaching parents and teachers to build stronger bonds with their children, and to help children form greater attachments to family and school. In a study of more than 800 adults throughout their 30s 鈥� a group the researchers have followed since they were fifth-graders at Seattle elementary schools in 1985 鈥� the people who reported better health and socioeconomic status were, consistently, those whose parents and teachers had received lessons aimed at building stronger bonds with their children decades ago.

The researchers know of no other study of a program provided during elementary school that has followed participants for this long. Participants in the longitudinal study, known as the Seattle Social Development Project, have responded to surveys over the years about health, , even the . Such research requires participants who will stick with a study over a big stretch of their lives, and nearly 90% of them have done just that.聽The sample has about equal numbers of males and females, half are racial minorities, and about half had experienced poverty in childhood.

The latest study involved coming up with broad measures of health and functioning in adulthood, surveying participants on specific issues related to those measures, and comparing participants whose teachers and parents received the bonding interventions during elementary school with those who didn’t.

鈥淭hese early elementary-school interventions seek to make kids鈥� current lives better both in and out of school,鈥� said , a principal investigator with the Social Development Research Group, part of the UW School of Social Work. 鈥淏ut can we actually get kids on a different life trajectory that lasts beyond elementary school? In fact, we found enduring effects, where they鈥檙e having an overall better experience in adulthood.鈥�

The prevention curriculum, called , was created by UW social work professors and . The lessons, for use by parents and teachers, focused on enhancing children’s opportunities for forming healthy bonds in grades 1 through 6 and providing them with social skills and reinforcements. Teachers and parents of children in some classrooms of the 18 participating Seattle elementary schools used the curriculum in the 1980s, while those in other classrooms did not have access to it.

Many of the concepts are teaching tools and parenting tips that are well-known today: reinforcing positive behaviors; setting expectations for making responsible choices; and promoting positive social interaction at school through group projects and seating arrangements. Table groups in the classroom facilitate cooperation and learning from one another, for example, while at home, parents can 鈥渃atch鈥� their child being good and offer praise. With older children, parents can discuss issues such as smoking so that standards for healthy behavior are established before the teen years.

For the published in late spring in Prevention Science, Kosterman devised a list of nine measurable aspects of life for people in their 30s: physical health; mental health; health maintenance behaviors (such as exercise and sleep); low sex-risk behavior; low rates of substance abuse; friendships and relationships; socioeconomic status (income, education, homeownership); responsibility (employment, managing finances); and civic engagement. The team then used surveys and in-person physical evaluations to determine participants鈥� health and successful functioning in adult life.

In a comprehensive test of effects that combined all nine indicators of a healthy and successful adult life, those from intervention classrooms when in elementary school reported significantly better outcomes than those from comparison classrooms through their 30s. Specific areas of significant improvement included fewer symptoms of mental health disorders, more engagement in health maintenance behaviors, and overall better health and socioeconomic success. On the remaining measures, the intervention group scored better on each one, though not as dramatically, compared with the control group.

It鈥檚 hard to attribute results that manifest decades later directly to the curriculum, said Hawkins, a co-author on the new study. But the changed behaviors of their teachers and parents during the elementary grades likely had a snowball effect, leading to positive relationships and responsible decision-making in adulthood.

鈥淲e worked to build healthier relationships 鈥� we call it social bonding 鈥� between teachers and students, and parents and children. The larger question was, if we do all these things, will it turn into a prosocial, healthy lifestyle?鈥� Hawkins said. 鈥淲e didn鈥檛 know we would see these results so much later in life.鈥�

In analyzing the data, researchers examined factors that tend to negatively affect health outcomes: whether a child grew up in poverty, was raised by a single parent, or born to a teenager. Participants who were born to a mother under age 20 were found to have a substantially lower quality of life on several of the measures, especially in the areas of socioeconomic status, physical health and substance abuse. The intervention effects the researchers found persisted even after controlling for these effects of being born to a teen mother.

鈥淭he most important thing we鈥檝e learned is to provide opportunities for kids to have positive social involvement,鈥� Hawkins said.聽 鈥淢ake sure your kids have the opportunity to engage with you as a parent. Play with them, hold them; don鈥檛 just sit on your phone when you鈥檙e with them.

鈥淲hen kids feel bonded to you, they鈥檙e less likely to violate your expectations. And you are likely to be setting them up to have better lives long into the future.鈥�

Kosterman and his team have applied for funding to conduct further research on the group, now in their mid-40s, in midlife. “More studies are needed that test childhood interventions and follow participants through the 30s and beyond,” Kosterman added, “but we are encouraged that these findings suggest that lasting change for important outcomes is possible.”

The study was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. In addition to Catalano, other co-authors on the study were of the UW Social Development Research Group; , emeritus professor in the UW College of Education; and of the University of Colorado, Boulder.

For more information, contact Kosterman at rickk@uw.edu or 206-543-4546.

Grant numbers: R01DA033956, 1R01DA024411, 1R01DA09679

Want to prevent kids from using drugs and make it stick into young adulthood? Get the community involved and intervene before they鈥檙e teens, say researchers from the 天美影视传媒.

A new, longitudinal study from the UW shows that young adults who grew up in communities that used a coordinated, science-based approach to prevention were more likely to have abstained from substance use, violence and other antisocial behaviors through age 21.

Researchers at the group, part of the UW School of Social Work, examined a decade鈥檚 worth of participant data across seven states as they evaluated the effectiveness of the (CTC) prevention system. Their was published online in April in the American Journal of Public Health.

鈥淭his study is significant because we show that we have these long-term effects through age 21,鈥� said , lead author and assistant director of the Social Development Research Group. 鈥淭he youth we have been following weren鈥檛 exposed to prevention-oriented programs after middle school, so that suggests that whatever happened by middle school, they carried [those influences] with them, and it鈥檚 made such a lasting impact on their lives.鈥�

UW social work professors and created Communities That Care, an approach that helps communities organize around prevention, choose programs that are appropriate for their populations, and collect information on young people鈥檚 experiences with alcohol, drug and tobacco use, and delinquency. The idea, they say, is to give children, parents, teachers and community members the opportunities and tools to adopt and sustain healthy behaviors. Today, hundreds of cities and towns nationwide use the program.

The study was conducted among 4,400 youth participants in 24 rural communities in Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Oregon, Utah and Washington. Towns were randomly assigned as 鈥渃ontrol鈥� communities or as intervention communities. Control communities maintained whatever prevention programming was in place, while intervention communities used the CTC system to select evidence-based, prevention-oriented programs according to the risk factors that were found to be higher among their youth. Communities were asked to focus on grades five to nine.

Many intervention communities opted for three to five programs over time, such as classroom-based lessons in life skills, after-school activities like Big Brothers Big Sisters or parent-support classes. Training began in 2003, and selected programs were launched in 2004, when the children were in sixth grade. Monitoring of the participants’ behavior continued for a decade through surveys.

For many of the measured behaviors, participants from intervention communities were more likely to have abstained through age 21 than those in the control group. Among those who had never used substances or engaged in antisocial behavior at the beginning of the study, incidence rates were still generally lower among participants from intervention communities compared to those from control communities.

Results showed:

• The likelihood of abstaining from a 鈥済ateway drug鈥� (alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana) through age 21 was 49 percent higher among participants from Communities That Care towns.
• CTC participants were 18 percent more likely to abstain through age 21 from criminal behavior, such as vandalism, theft and illegal use of weapons.
• Among males, participants from intervention communities were significantly more likely to abstain through age 21 from cigarette smoking, marijuana and inhalant use, as well as from antisocial behavior and violence. These differences were smaller among females.
• Although more participants from intervention communities never engaged in these behaviors, the proportion who used drugs or engaged in criminal and violent behavior in the past year did not differ between control and intervention communities.

The gender differences need more study to be fully explained, Oesterle said. One theory is that the risk factors targeted by the prevention programs may be more relevant for boys than girls. Perhaps the kinds of behaviors or 鈥減rotective factors鈥� that would be more meaningful to girls weren鈥檛 emphasized as much in the chosen programs.

In 2004, when the study launched, states had not yet begun legalizing recreational marijuana. Plans for the next phase of the study, pending funding, call for a focus on whether that new access has affected marijuana use for young adults in the study, Oesterle said.

For now, this study reveals broader implications for public health, she said. Communities often want to tackle a problem behavior or head one off, but they don鈥檛 always know where to start.

鈥淚t shows that if a community invests in a coordinated and data-driven prevention planning system, you have this long-term effect that gets sustained,鈥� Oesterle said. 鈥淚f a community adopts CTC, they own the process, based on their local culture and values. With Communities That Care, you鈥檙e not just focusing on the most high-risk kids; you鈥檙e trying to prevent the beginning of problems for everyone.鈥�

Along with Oesterle and Hawkins, other authors of the study were and of the Social Development Research Group and and of the UW Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

The study was supported by a research grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, with additional funding from the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

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For more information, contact Oesterle at soe@uw.edu or 206-221-4917.

Grant number: R01 DA015183

Counseling was found to be a much more effective means of combating marijuana use. And while enforcement of anti-drug policies is a key factor in whether teens use marijuana, the way schools respond to policy violators matters greatly.

The , conducted by researchers at the 天美影视传媒 and in Australia, compared drug policies at schools in Washington state and Victoria, Australia, to determine how they impacted student marijuana use.

The results startled researchers: Students attending schools with suspension policies for illicit drug use were 1.6 times more likely than their peers at schools without such policies to use marijuana in the next year 鈥� and that was the case with the student body as a whole, not just those who were suspended.

“That was surprising to us,” said co-author , professor of social work and co-founder of the at the 天美影视传媒鈥檚 School of Social Work. “It means that suspensions are certainly not having a deterrent effect. It’s just the opposite.”

By contrast, the study found that students attending schools with policies of referring pot-using students to a teacher to discuss the dangers of marijuana use were 50 percent less likely to use marijuana. Other ways of responding to policy violators — sending them to educational programs, referring them to a school counselor or nurse, expelling them or calling the police — were found to have no significant impact on marijuana use.

The results were published online March 19 in the American Journal of Public Health.

Data for the research come from the , a long-term initiative started in 2002 to examine behaviors among young people in Washington and Victoria. The two states were chosen since they are similar in size and demographics, but differ considerably in their approaches to drug use among students. Washington schools are more likely to suspend students, call police or require offenders to attend education or cessation programs, the researchers note, while Victoria schools emphasize a harm-reduction approach that favors counseling.

Researchers surveyed more than 3,200 seventh- and ninth-graders and nearly 200 school administrators in both 2002 and 2003. Students were asked about their use of marijuana, alcohol and cigarettes and also about their schools’ drug policies and enforcement. In both survey years, pot use was higher among Washington students than those in Victoria 鈥� almost 12 percent of Washington ninth-graders had used marijuana in the past month, compared with just over 9 percent of Victoria ninth-graders.

The researchers were initially most interested in teens’ use of alcohol and cigarettes, Catalano said. But after Washington legalized recreational marijuana use for adults in 2012, researchers decided to take a closer look at the data to determine how legalization might influence students in Washington versus their counterparts in Australia, where pot remains illegal.

Tracy Evans-Whipp, the study’s lead author, said though the policies and marijuana use studied predate marijuana legalization in Washington, the findings provide useful insights about what types of school policies are most effective in steering teens away from the drug.

“Cross-national similarities in our findings suggest that school policy impacts on student marijuana use are unlikely to change, despite Washington legalizing marijuana,” said Evans-Whipp, research fellow at the Centre for Adolescent Health and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Victoria.

Research has shown a consistent link between increased access to marijuana and higher rates of self-reported use by adolescents, the study notes. In Washington and Colorado, where recreational marijuana use by adults was also legalized in 2012, school systems have new responsibilities to adequately educate students about marijuana and respond effectively when teens are caught using it, Catalano said.

“To reduce marijuana use among all students, we need to ensure that schools are using drug policies that respond to policy violations by educating or counseling students, not just penalizing them,” he said.

Other co-authors are Todd Herrenkohl at the UW, Stephanie Plenty at the Centre for Health Equity Studies in Sweden and John Toumbourou at Deakin University in Australia.

天美影视传媒 professor of social work and colleagues studied whether anti-alcohol policies in public and private schools in Washington state and Australia’s Victoria state were effective for eighth- and ninth-graders.

What they found was that each school’s particular policy mattered less than the students’ perceived enforcement of it. So, even if a school had a suspension or expulsion policy, if students felt the school didn’t enforce it then they were more likely to drink on campus. But, even if a school’s policy was less harsh 鈥� such as requiring counseling 鈥� students were less likely to drink at school if they believed school officials would enforce it.

“Whatever your school policy is, lax enforcement is related to more drinking,” Catalano said.

The study was published recently in the journal .

The results were similar in Washington, where the legal drinking age is 21 and schools tend to have a zero-tolerance approach, and Victoria, Australia, where the legal drinking age is 18 and policies are more about minimizing harm.

In the study, 44 percent of Victoria eighth-graders and 22 percent of Washington eighth-graders reported drinking alcohol. Victoria students also reported higher rates of binge drinking and alcohol-related harms.

Apart from perceptions about enforcement, harmful behaviors in both states were reduced when students believed policy violators would likely be counseled by a teacher on the dangers of alcohol use, rather than expelled or suspended.

“Schools should focus on zero tolerance and abstinence in primary and early middle school, but sometime between middle school and high school they have to blend in zero tolerance with harm minimization,” said Catalano, director of the Social Development Research Group at the UW and principal investigator for the International Youth Development Study. “By the time they get into high school they need new strategies.”

Those strategies could include talking to a teacher or being referred to treatment. The likelihood of binge drinking was reduced if students received an abstinence alcohol message or a harm minimization message, and if they believed teachers would talk to them about the dangers of alcohol. Catalano said such remediation policies are an important predictor of less alcohol use among ninth-graders.

He said the study shows harsh punishment for drinking on school grounds, such as calling the police or expelling the student, doesn’t inhibit alcohol use on campus. Instead, long-term negative impacts of expulsion mean students feel disconnected from school and may subsequently drink more. Calling the police, which gives the student a police record, appears to make things even worse.

“What we’ve seen in other studies from this sample is suspension policies actually worsen the behavior problem,” Catalano said. “What that says to me is, although you want policies and you want enforcement of policies, there are other ways of responding than suspension, expulsion and calling the police: Getting a student to talk to a teacher about how alcohol might be harmful, or a session with the school counselor.”

The study was funded by the , , and Victorian Government’s Operational Infrastructure Support Program. Co-authors are Todd Herrenkohl of the UW, lead author Tracy Evans-Whipp and Stephanie Plenty of in Victoria, Australia, and John Toumbourou of in Australia.

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For more information, contact Catalano at 206-543-6382, or catalano@uw.edu.