The Family Life Project (FLP) began in 2003 and is a long-running longitudinal birth-cohort study of a sample of 1,292 children and primary caregivers followed from birth in six predominately low income and rural counties in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. A specific focus of the FLP has been the prospective investigation of associations between early-life stress—characterized by the physical and psychosocial characteristics of the home, including parenting quality—and neurodevelopment in a wide range of areas including self-regulation, child language development, school achievement, risk for psychopathology, and physical and mental health.

In 2016 the FLP joined the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program to become the FLP-ECHO project. ECHO is a research program supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to enhance the health of children for generations to come. The goal of the ECHO Program is to understand the effects of a broad range of early environmental influences on child health and development. ECHO brings together participants from approximately 72 cohorts across the country to examine questions related to participants' health and everyday lives across time. For more information, please visit https://echochildren.org/.