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Showing 13 verified claims · developmental risk & environment
Cumulative early-childhood adversity is associated, in a graded manner, with elevated population-level risk of adverse developmental and behavioral outcomes, establishing early adversity as a developmental risk factor relevant to the rationale for early-childhood developmental supports.
Early-childhood lead exposure is associated, in a graded dose-response manner, with reduced cognitive and behavioral development at the population level, with no identified safe threshold.
Frequent, destabilizing, and often involuntary residential moves are associated with greater behavioral and emotional difficulties in children, but effects depend on timing, reason, destination, continuity, and support. Moves into safer, more stable, or higher-opportunity environments can be neutral or beneficial.
Household food insecurity is associated with poorer academic and cognitive functioning and increased behavioral and mental-health risk in children; severity, persistence, and transitions in food security may matter.
Maternal smoking during pregnancy is associated with some adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes, including developmental coordination, small average IQ differences, ADHD diagnoses, and selected brain or behavioral measures, but causality is outcome-specific; genetically sensitive research does not support a clear causal prenatal-smoking-to-ADHD relationship.
Prenatal alcohol exposure causes a dose-related spectrum of neurodevelopmental harm — lowered IQ and deficits in learning and memory, executive function, and attention regulation, with or without facial dysmorphology — and is a leading preventable cause of developmental disability; no safe level of alcohol use during pregnancy has been established.
Prenatal and childhood secondhand tobacco-smoke exposure is associated at the population level with small differences in some cognitive, executive-function, attention, learning, and developmental outcomes, but findings are inconsistent across domains and exposure windows.
Randomized human evidence shows that severe early deprivation of stable, responsive caregiving can cause lasting cognitive and psychiatric harm, and that early placement into stable, high-quality family care can substantially improve outcomes.
Children's access to green space and parks is associated with better cognitive development (notably attention and working memory), fewer mental-health and behavioral difficulties — especially hyperactivity and inattention — and greater physical activity; the associations are fairly consistent and often robust to socioeconomic confounding, but most evidence is observational and heterogeneous, and the effects are partly mediated by reduced air-pollution exposure and increased physical activity.
Adverse housing conditions, including damp or mold, overcrowding, and poor structural or indoor quality, are associated at the population level with increased emotional and behavioral difficulties among children and young people, but findings vary by exposure, outcome, and context.
Chronic environmental-noise exposure, particularly aircraft noise around schools, is associated with poorer reading comprehension and long-term memory in children.
Higher prenatal and early-childhood exposure to air pollution, especially fine particulate matter, is associated with lower cognitive performance and poorer attention and executive functioning in children.
Maternal depression during pregnancy and after birth is associated at the population level with small average differences across children's cognitive, emotional, social, and behavioral development; findings for language, motor, and particular later outcomes are less consistent.