COLUMBUS, Ohio – New research shows that overall, the prevalence of adverse and positive childhood experiences reported by parents of teenagers hasn't changed substantially in the United States in recent years.
The findings suggest that interventions designed to boost positive family experiences and shield children from negative experiences may not be hitting the mark on a national scale, the study's authors say.
In all, the study examined the prevalence of 11 adverse and seven positive childhood experiences reported by parents of adolescents between 2016 and 2023 in a large national survey. Adverse experiences included parental divorce, death or incarceration, witnessing violence and facing discrimination. Positive experiences included being mentored by an adult, family resilience in the face of difficulties, participating in organized or service activities, and neighborhood safety and support.
Senior author Susie Breitenstein , a professor of nursing at The Ohio State University , develops research-based parent training programs designed to improve the social and emotional well-being of parents and children.
"I do early intervention parenting work, and the goal really is to decrease the incidence of adverse childhood experiences and increase the incidence of positive childhood experiences. So this really connects with the work of our lab in terms of early intervention and prevention through strength-based approaches in parenting," Breitenstein said.
"I think at a local level we have had some success, but at a national level it doesn't seem like we've really moved the needle a lot on some of these experiences," she said. "This was kind of surprising to us."
The study is published today (Oct. 20, 2025) in JAMA Pediatrics.
Previous research has shown that adverse childhood experiences can raise the risk for disease, mental illness and substance misuse in adulthood, and positive childhood experiences may help prevent kids from having psychological and relationship problems as adults.
Most additional research has focused on identifying segments of the population at highest risk for adverse childhood experience or estimating how many adverse or positive life events the average child will experience.
The Ohio State team took a different approach, aiming to describe the percentage of teens who experienced specific adverse and positive childhood experiences, and whether the prevalence changed over eight years spanning the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. Data on 125,564 adolescents aged 12 to 17 came from the National Survey of Children's Health .
"We predicted that we might see pretty dramatic changes in direction around 2020 or 2021. And one of the surprising things we found was that, with a couple of exceptions that make a lot of sense, things were actually pretty stable," said co-author and lead statistician Nathan Helsabeck , a research assistant professor of nursing at Ohio State.
"We saw a decrease in economic hardship in the first couple of years as the country was coming out of the 2008 financial crisis, and then directly following COVID in 2021, we saw a decrease in participation in activities, which is thought to be a positive childhood experience."
Economic hardship showed the sharpest drop among adverse childhood experiences, decreasing in prevalence by about 25% from 2016 to 2023. The most common adverse experience, affecting at least 30% of teens but declining by about 1% during the study period, was having divorced parents. The adverse experience with the steepest increase, of about 6% overall, was racial discrimination.
There was a bright spot: Among this national sample, positive childhood experiences were far more common than adverse experiences, with positives reported by between roughly 40% and 90% of parents compared to all negative experiences affecting fewer than 35% of adolescents.
Adverse childhood experiences have had a prominent role in influencing policy, Breitenstein said – but positive experiences are gaining traction among researchers exploring whether positive childhood experiences may buffer the effects of negative events.
"There are complex dynamics across experiences that intersect across family, community and the broader society," she said. "And in our work, we constantly talk about strength-based approaches and the importance of propping those up, and how to do that. Because sometimes you can't avoid these adverse experiences, especially when we talk about something like divorce."
Using national data to detail the overall prevalence of childhood experiences at a population level has accomplished a central goal for the team: providing a baseline to inform future studies.
"This is a really clear, straightforward baseline that other researchers or policymakers could use to build a case for an intervention or other work," Helsabeck said.
Breitenstein and her colleagues, who study how social and community support influence outcomes for youth experiencing homelessness and psychiatric treatment, plan to put the data to use.
"There are a lot of things that help strengthen children's experiences, but they don't always cross paths or build on each other," Breitenstein said. "We know these things matter, so we'll use the data to shore up the resources we can to help support others."
This work was supported by the Ohio State College of Nursing Martha S. Pitzer Center for Women, Children and Youth ; the National Institute of Nursing Research ; and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences .
First author Jack Krupa, who led the research project, worked in Breitenstein's lab through the former Discovery Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program , an Ohio State College of Medicine initiative funded by the National Institutes of Health. He is now a PhD student at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Additional co-authors, all from Ohio State, were Jodi Ford, Kayla Herbell, Margaret Fitzpatrick, Lia Pinkus, Stephanie Hosley and Barbara Warren.
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