Growing Up in New Zealand: A longitudinal study of New Zealand children and their families. Vulnerability Report 2: Transitions in exposure to vulnerability in the first 1000 days of life.

This is the second report in the Vulnerability and Resilience series from the Growing Up in New Zealand team. This second report on early life vulnerability builds on the information delivered in the earlier Vulnerability Report 1: Exploring the Definition of Vulnerability for Children in their First 1000 Days (2014). It similarly utilises information collected from the families at key time points during the first thousand days of their children’s development (from conception until they are 2 years old).

This report focuses on describing transitions in exposure to vulnerability risk factors for the children in the Growing Up in New Zealand cohort between the time of late pregnancy and their early postnatal lives. It also explores what family and environmental characteristics are associated with transitions in exposure to vulnerability over time. In addition to defining what family and environmental characteristics are associated with exposure to vulnerability, the report extends the exploration of what later health outcomes exposure is associated with to include behavioural outcomes (based on the well validated Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire). This exploration of the downstream effects of early life vulnerability cannot yet provide complete evidence to address the important question, ‘Vulnerable to what?’ but it does provide further evidence that early and repeated exposure to adversity has impacts that affect multiple areas of child development, and that these impacts are already seen within the first 1000 days of a child’s development.