Scholars@Duke
Helen Milojevich

Helen Milojevich

Research Scientist
Social Science Research Institute
helen.milojevich@duke.edu
Box 90539, Durham, NC 27708
255 Sanford Building, Box 90539, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

Perspectives of home visiting providers on internal factors that promote enrollment and continued participation for families.

Journal Article Child abuse & neglect · September 2025 BackgroundHome visiting is an evidence-based service to reduce child abuse and neglect while providing parental information and resources. Despite strong empirical evidence for the benefits of home visiting, most eligible families do not enroll in ... Full text Cite

Adversity in Childhood and Its Association with Caregiving of a Parent in Adulthood

Journal Article Journal of Child and Family Studies · May 1, 2025 To examine the relationship between adversity in childhood and regular caregiving of a parent in adulthood. Using 2019 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data from four states that administered both the caregiving and Adverse Childhood Expe ... Full text Cite

Developmental Monitoring and Promotion in Home Visiting: a Qualitative Study of Parents and Providers.

Journal Article Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research · April 2025 Developmental monitoring and promotion efforts are keys to identifying potential developmental concerns and connecting young children to intervention services. Evidence-based home visiting programs are one avenue for developmental monitoring and promotion, ... Full text Cite

Adverse Childhood Experiences and Cannabis Use Among US Adults: Do Poor Health and Disability Influence Types of Cannabis Use?

Journal Article Substance use & misuse · January 2025 Background: Research suggests that individuals who experience four or more adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have increased rates of cannabis use. However, most prior research does not separate recreational and medical usage. Medical cannabis is ... Full text Cite

Father Engagement in Home Visiting: Findings From a Continuous Quality Improvement Learning Collaborative.

Journal Article Journal of public health management and practice : JPHMP · November 2024 The present study describes the efforts of a home visiting (HV) continuous quality improvement learning collaborative aimed at increasing father engagement in HV and parenting. Local implementing agencies (n   = 11) delivering 3 evidence-based HV models pa ... Full text Cite

Risk and Protective Factors Associated with Adverse Childhood Experiences in Vulnerable Families: Results of a Randomized Clinical Trial of SafeCare®.

Journal Article Child maltreatment · May 2023 Early adversity predicts increased risk for mental and physical health problems. As such, intervention efforts, such as home-based parenting programs, have been initiated with vulnerable families to reduce adversity exposure and promote child well-being. T ... Full text Cite

A theory-based approach to understanding best practices in using online marketing materials for home-based parenting programs

Journal Article Children and Youth Services Review · May 1, 2023 Home-based parenting programs provide one-on-one coaching to help parents experiencing high-risk factors (e.g., living in poverty, substance abuse, mental health issues, interpersonal violence) to learn safety, health, and parenting skills. Although these ... Full text Cite

Building an ecological momentary assessment smartphone app for 4- to 10-year-old children: A pilot study.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2023 ObjectiveEcological momentary assessment (EMA) minimizes recall burden and maximizes ecological validity and has emerged as a valuable tool to characterize individual differences, assess contextual associations, and document temporal associations. ... Full text Cite

Predictors of family violence in North Carolina following initial COVID-19 stay-at-home orders.

Journal Article Child abuse & neglect · August 2022 BackgroundAlthough there is evidence that family violence increased in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, few studies have characterized longitudinal trends in family violence across the course of initial stay-at-home orders.Objec ... Full text Cite

Perceived Social Status and Suicidal Ideation in Maltreated Children and Adolescents.

Journal Article Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · March 2022 Recent decades have seen an alarming increase in rates of suicide among young people, including children and adolescents ("youth"). Although child maltreatment constitutes a well-established risk factor for suicidal ideation in youth, few efforts have focu ... Full text Cite

Primary and Secondary Variants of Psychopathic Traits in at-Risk Youth: Links with Maltreatment, Aggression, and Empathy.

Journal Article Child psychiatry and human development · December 2021 The current study examined whether two variants of psychopathic traits (PT) were identifiable in high-risk youth who had not yet been identified as antisocial, some of whom had documented histories of maltreatment (N = 167, Mage = 14.84), and th ... Full text Cite

Heterogeneity of Social Marginalization in Early Adolescence: Longitudinal Associations with Behavioral and Social Adjustment.

Journal Article Journal of youth and adolescence · November 2021 Integration into formal and informal peer groups is a key developmental task during early adolescence. As youth begin to place greater value on attaining acceptance and popularity among peers, social status among one's peer group becomes an important marke ... Full text Cite

Adversity and Emotional Functioning.

Journal Article Affective science · September 2021 Exposure to early adversity has been linked to variations in emotional functioning. To date, however, the precise nature of these variations has been difficult to pinpoint given widespread differences in the ways in which aspects of emotional functioning a ... Full text Cite

Quality of Sibling Relationships in Maltreated Youth Residing in Out-of-Home-Care.

Journal Article Journal of interpersonal violence · January 2021 When children are removed from their parents's custody because of substantiated maltreatment and placed in out-of-home placements, they may be placed separately from siblings, potentially leading to even higher levels of stress in children. This possibilit ... Full text Cite

Early adversity and children's emotion regulation: Differential roles of parent emotion regulation and adversity exposure.

Journal Article Development and psychopathology · December 2020 Exposure to early life adversity (ELA) is associated with increased rates of psychopathology and poor physical health. The present study builds on foundational work by Megan Gunnar identifying how ELA results in poor long-term outcomes through alterations ... Full text Cite

Participation in Social Skills Therapy is Associated With Enhanced Recall Memory by Children With Down Syndrome: An Exploratory Study.

Journal Article Behavior modification · July 2020 Participation in social skills therapy (SST) facilitates cognitive functioning in children with developmental disabilities. The present pilot study examined whether participation in SST was associated with enhanced encoding and 1-month delayed recall in ch ... Full text Cite

Sleep problems and recall memory in children with Down syndrome and typically developing controls.

Journal Article Research in developmental disabilities · January 2020 BackgroundResearch conducted with typically developing (TD) infants and children generally indicates that better habitual sleep and sleep after learning are related to enhanced memory. Less is known, however, about associations between sleep and r ... Full text Cite

Early Environmental Unpredictability: Implications for Youth's Perceptions and Social Functioning.

Journal Article Journal of youth and adolescence · September 2019 According to an evolutionary perspective, early environmental unpredictability induces expectations in youth that their future is uncertain and increases their likelihood of engaging in opportunistic, impulsive, and aggressive behaviors. Although considera ... Full text Cite

Deprivation and threat, emotion dysregulation, and psychopathology: Concurrent and longitudinal associations.

Journal Article Development and psychopathology · August 2019 Maltreatment increases risk for psychopathology in childhood and adulthood, thus identifying mechanisms that influence these associations is necessary for future prevention and intervention. Emotion dysregulation resulting from maltreatment is one potentia ... Full text Cite

Unpacking the Associations Among Maltreatment, Disengagement Coping, and Behavioral Functioning in High-Risk Youth.

Journal Article Child maltreatment · November 2018 Given the association between child maltreatment and a host of negative behavioral consequences, there remains a need to continue to identify mechanisms underlying this association as a means of improving intervention efforts. The present study examined on ... Full text Cite

Longitudinal associations between physically abusive parents' emotional expressiveness and children's self-regulation.

Journal Article Child abuse & neglect · March 2018 The present study took a developmental psychopathology approach to examine the longitudinal association between parents' emotional expressiveness and children's self-regulation. Data collection spanned from 2004 to 2008. Ninety-two physically abusive paren ... Full text Cite

The role of maltreatment in the development of coping strategies.

Journal Article Journal of applied developmental psychology · January 2018 Child maltreatment leads to deleterious effects in virtually every developmental domain, including cognitive, psychological, and behavioral functioning. Although difficulties with coping have been identified as contributing to these effects, less attention ... Full text Cite

Three-year Trajectories of Emotional Expressiveness among Maltreating Mothers: The Role of Life Changes.

Journal Article Journal of child and family studies · January 2018 Parents are perhaps the most direct and profound influences on children's development of emotional competence. For example, how and what emotions parents express in the family has implications for children's ability to understand and regulate their emotion ... Full text Cite

Sleep problems and temperament in young children with Down syndrome and typically developing controls.

Journal Article Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR · March 2017 BackgroundAlthough group differences have been found between children with Down syndrome (DS) and typically developing (TD) children when considering sleep problems and temperament independently, none of the research conducted to date has examined ... Full text Cite

Parental Attachment and Children's Memory for Attachment-Relevant Stories.

Journal Article Applied developmental science · January 2017 Despite evidence that parents' attachment is associated with children's memory, less is known about the mechanisms underlying this association or the contexts in which the association is most meaningful. The present study examined whether parents' attachme ... Full text Cite

Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm.

Journal Article Journal of visualized experiments : JoVE · April 2016 The ability to recall the past allows us to report on details of previous experiences, from the everyday to the significant. Because recall memory is commonly assessed using verbal report paradigms in adults, studying the development of this ability in pre ... Full text Cite

Recall memory in children with Down syndrome and typically developing peers matched on developmental age.

Journal Article Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR · January 2016 BackgroundWhereas research has indicated that children with Down syndrome (DS) imitate demonstrated actions over short delays, it is presently unknown whether children with DS recall information over lengthy delays at levels comparable with typica ... Full text Cite

Sleep and Mental Health in Undergraduate Students with Generally Healthy Sleep Habits.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2016 Whereas previous research has indicated that sleep problems tend to co-occur with increased mental health issues in university students, relatively little is known about relations between sleep quality and mental health in university students with generall ... Full text Cite

Language facilitates event memory in early childhood: Child comprehension, adult-provided linguistic support and delayed recall at 16 months.

Journal Article Memory (Hove, England) · January 2015 Adult-provided supportive language facilitates memory for the past in preverbal and verbal children. Work conducted with 18-month-olds indicates that children benefit from supportive adult language when tested after a 4-week delay but not when tested immed ... Full text Cite

Sleep quality and temperament among university students: differential associations with nighttime sleep duration and sleep disruptions.

Journal Article Behavioral sleep medicine · January 2015 Sleep-temperament associations have not yet been examined among university students, despite awareness of the high incidence of sleep problems in this population. The present study was conducted (a) to examine whether sleep quality was associated with temp ... Full text Cite

Adult language use and infant comprehension of English: associations with encoding and generalization across cues at 20 months.

Journal Article Infant behavior & development · November 2014 Adult-provided language shapes event memory in children who are preverbal and in those who are able to discuss the past using language. The research conducted to date, however, has not yet established whether infant language comprehension abilities moderat ... Full text Cite

Stress at encoding, context at retrieval, and children's narrative content.

Journal Article Journal of experimental child psychology · November 2013 Research concerning the relations between stress and children's memory has been primarily correlational and focused on memory volume and accuracy. In the current study, we experimentally manipulated 7- and 8-year-olds' and 12- to 14-year-olds' experienced ... Full text Cite

Sleeping like a baby: Examining relations between habitual infant sleep, recall memory, and generalization across cues at 10 months.

Journal Article Infant behavior & development · June 2013 Previous research suggests that sleep is related to cognitive functioning in infants and adults. In the present study, we examined whether individual differences in infant sleep habits over the seven days prior to elicited imitation testing were associated ... Full text Cite