Research project Childhood trauma and its transgenerational response

We hope to contribute to a rapidly evolving discussion, across disciplines, about trans-generational effects and “trans-generational response”. We intend to test empirically some of the ideas proposed recently in the field. Childhood experience is known to be formative for personal development; for physical growth, school achievement, cognitive ability and early friendships. We will analyse specific childhood experiences that may influence health and social career over an individual’s life course, but our main research question concerns subsequent generations.

Could severe childhood trauma (such as parental death) trigger a cascade of events influencing development (physical, emotional and/or cognitive) across generations, detectable both in the exposed children themselves and in their children? If so, is there a specific period of childhood which constitutes a “critical window” of susceptibility for such a trans-generational response to evolve? Finally, is any such critical period the same for boys and girls and its impact similar along paternal and maternal lines of transmission? We will address those questions using a database, spanning three generations, the last generation including all births in Sweden 1972-2002.

We test whether grandparental death during parents’ childhood influence outcomes in generation 3, focusing on their birth weight and educational achievement and for a subcohort (of men) BMI, psychological functioning and cognitive ability.