Growing Up in New Zealand: A longitudinal study of New Zealand children and their families. Now we are Two: Describing our first 1000 days

This report provides a full description of the children in the cohort when they are two years old. It builds on the previous comprehensive descriptive reports that were released in 2010 and 2012 which documented the early life journeys of our new generation of New Zealand children from before they were born and throughout infancy. This Now we are Two report provides an overview of the journey the children have taken in their first thousand days of life (from conception to age two years). This period in the life course is acknowledged as being critically important for shaping life time development across multiple outcomes including health and wellbeing, cognitive and educational outcomes and later behaviours. It is therefore especially rewarding to begin to understand what milestones the Growing Up in New Zealand children have reached at this point and importantly what has shaped this development.

The information in this report once again highlights the diversity of the families and environments that the current generation of New Zealand children are growing up in. These environments are remarkably different than a generation ago. For example, children are living with families that include multiple generations and non-kin, and are commonly living in rental accommodation. Because we now have information over three time points we can also begin to appreciate how dynamic aspects such as household structure are across the cohort and how often they change for individual children during their first years of life. This current generation of children are highly likely to have moved house more than once during their first thousand days.

Now we are Two: Describing our first 1000 days is the first in a series of reports about the children at two years of age, and it highlights some of the proximal influences which are most important for shaping the development of the children in Growing Up in New Zealand. Information in this report is primarily that collected during the two year data collection wave (DCW), but the report also draws upon longitudinal information from the antenatal DCW, the perinatal linked data, the six week telephone call, nine month DCW, and the 35-week and 23 month telephone interviews. This combination of data sources allows us to describe the cohort children throughout their first 1000 days of life.