Shared worlds and shared consequences: Initial validation of the Assessment of Parent and Child Adversity (APCA)

Background: Advancing understanding of how early adversity arises, manifests, and contributes to health difficulties depends on accurate measurement of children’s experiences. In addition to fetal exposure to the physiological consequences of prenatal adversity, individuals’ exposure to adversity is often intertwined with that of their caregivers in early life. Here, we introduce and present psychometric properties of a novel measure of adversity, the Assessment of Parent and Child Adversity (APCA), which simultaneously characterizes parents’ and children’s adversity.Methods: During pregnancy, women from a longitudinal cohort reported their past adverse experiences. When their children were at ages 3–5 years, a subset of 97 mothers completed the APCA, the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, and the Benevolent Childhood Experiences scale. They reported their current symptoms of depression and anxiety and their child’s emotional and behavioral problems. Using the APCA, we distinguished between maternal adversity during different periods (childhood, preconception, prenatal, since child’s birth) and obtained metrics of child witnessing of and direct exposure to adversity. Results: The APCA efficiently captured maternal exposure to 40 types of adversity and child exposure to 10 types of direct adversity; it also demonstrated good convergent and divergent validity with other measures of maternal adverse and positive experiences, respectively. Measures of maternal adversity were strongly associated with maternal symptoms of psychopathology, with evidence for effects of developmental timing. Children whose mothers experienced greater adversity, particularly in the prenatal period, had more emotional and behavioral problems, as did children who were directly exposed to greater adversity.Conclusions: The APCA has good usability and convergent, discriminant, and criterion validity. Leveraging the ability of the APCA to distinguish between adversity occurring during different life stages and originating from different sources, our findings highlight potentially distinct effects of different aspects of maternal and child adversity on difficulties in maternal and child mental health.