Early exposure to neighborhood crime and child internalizing and externalizing behaviors

This paper examines the relationship between exposure to neighborhood crime and child mental health. We merge restricted contextual data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study with the National Neighborhood Crime Study, a nationally representative neighborhood sample containing tract-level Uniform Crime Report data for large U.S. cities and clustered OLS regression models to examine how objective measures of robbery or burglary rates at or around birth influence the health and behavior of 566 girls and 646 boys in urban neighborhoods. Findings demonstrate that living in a high crime neighborhood is associated with higher levels of internalizing and externalizing behavior problems for preschool-aged boys and girls. However, these patterns differ for boys and girls and across measures of violent (robbery) and property crime (burglary).