Housing instability is a thought to be a major influence on children's healthy growth and development. However, little is known about the factors that influence housing instability, limiting the identification of effective interventions. The goals of this study were to 1) explore factors, including material hardship, satisfaction with living conditions and housing disrepair, that predict housing instability (total number of moves that a child experienced in the first seven years); and 2) examine the relationship between housing instability and child behavior at age 7, measured by the Child Behavior Checklist. We analyzed these associations among children enrolled in the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health (CCCEH) Mothers and Newborns study. In our analysis, we found that housing disrepair predicted residential change after 3 years of age, but not before. Persistent material hardship over the seven-year time period from pregnancy through age 7 was associated with increased number of moves. Children who experienced more than three moves in the first 7 years had significantly more thought- and attention-related problems compared to children who experienced less than 3 moves over the same time period. Children who experienced more than 3 moves also had higher total and internalizing problem behavior scores, although these differences were not statistically significant. We conclude that housing instability is significantly associated with problem behavior in early childhood and that interventions to reduce socioeconomic strain may have the greatest impact in breaking the cycle of children's environmental health disparities related to housing instability.
Keywords: Early childhood; child behavior; housing instability; material hardship.