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November 24, 2009
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Children and Families Click on a researcher's name to display only his or her recent research projects.
Sara McLanahan, Sarah Meadows, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn examined the association between parental major depressive and generalized anxiety disorders and child behavior problems across a variety of family types: married, cohabiting, involved nonresident father, and noninvolved nonresident father. They found that among three-year-olds, maternal anxiety/depression is associated with increased odds of anxious/depressed, attention deficit, and oppositional defiant disorders. Paternal anxiety/depression had no significant association with these problem behaviors; however, it exacerbated anxious/depressed behaviors in young children if both parents were ill and if the father was coresident. The findings underscore the importance of maternal mental health for child wellbeing and suggest that a negative interaction between parent illnesses is most likely when parents and children share the same disorder.
Sara McLanahan, Carey Cooper, Sarah Meadows, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn used data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 2,753) to examine family structure transitions and maternal parenting stress. Using multilevel modeling techniques, they found that mothers who exit co-residential relationships with a biological father or enter co-residential relationships with a non-biological father experience higher levels of parenting stress than mothers in stable co-residential relationships. Mothers' pre-transition resources account for very little of these associations, whereas post-transition resources appear to mediate the associations. Significant interactions between maternal education and family structure transitions suggest that divorcing a biological father or moving in with a non-biological father increases parenting stress for less educated mothers. In contrast, moving in with a biological father decreases stress for highly educated mothers.
Sara McLanahan, with Shelly Lundberg and Elaina Rose of the University of Washington, examined the effects of child gender on father involvement to determine if gender effects differ by parents' marital status. They examined several indicators of father involvement, including whether the father acknowledged "ownership" of the child, whether the parents lived together when the child was one year old, and whether the father provided financial support when the child was one year old. Among unmarried parents, they found some evidence that child gender is associated with fathers' involvement around the time of the birth: sons born to unmarried parents are more likely than daughters to receive the father's surname, especially if the mother has no other children. However, one year after birth, they found very little evidence that child gender was related to parents' living arrangements or the amount of time or money fathers invest in their children. In contrast, and consistent with previous research, fathers who were married when their child is born were more likely to live with a son than with a daughter one year after birth. This pattern supports an interpretation of child gender effects based on parental beliefs about the importance of fathers for the long-term development of sons.
With Rachel Kimbro (Rice University), Sara McLanahan and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn examined racial/ethnic differences in overweight and obesity in three-year-old children from low-income, urban families and assessed the possible determinants of this difference. They found that 35 percent of the study children were overweight or obese. Hispanic children were twice as likely as either black or white children to be overweight or obese. After controlling for a wide variety of characteristics, they were unable to explain either white--Hispanic or black--Hispanic differences in overweight and obesity. However, birth weight, taking a bottle to bed, and mother's weight status were important predictors of children's overweight or obesity at age three years. The study shows that race/ethnic gaps in obesity appear as early as age three.
McLanahan, Carey Cooper, Audrey Beck, and Cynthia Osborne (University of Texas) used data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 2,957) to examine partnership instability and children's wellbeing during the transition to elementary school. They found that co-residential transitions are related to externalizing, attention, and social problems. Mothers' mental health and use of harsh parenting partially mediate the associations between co-residential transitions and child outcomes at age five. The impact of co-residential transitions on externalizing, attention, and social problems is stronger for boys than girls. Also, nonco- residential transitions predict externalizing and attention problems for white children but not for Hispanic children. Finally, the association between co-residential transitions and verbal ability is stronger for children with highly educated mothers than for children of less educated mothers.
With Columbia University colleagues Amanda Geller, Irv Garfinkel, and Ronald Mincy, Carey Cooper looked at parental incarceration and child wellbeing and its implications for urban families. Using Fragile Families data, they found that children of incarcerated parents face more economic and residential instability than their counterparts. Children of incarcerated fathers also display more behavior problems, though other development differences are insignificant. Several family differences are magnified when both parents have been incarcerated.
Michelle DeKlyen's major research uses data from the Fragile Families Study to examine the strengths, risks, and needs of families of children born in Newark, New Jersey. Her findings have been disseminated through invitational forums and presentations to a variety of local organizations, through research briefs on language development and fathers' involvement, and through a website. Funds for this project were provided by the Fund for New Jersey, the Schumann Fund for New Jersey, the Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey, and the Sagner Family Foundation. Among the findings of this research, children born in Newark hospitals were more likely to have low birthweights, to be asthmatic, and to be hospitalized overnight in their first year of life than were children born in other large cities. At three years of age they had lower vocabulary scores and more behavior problems. Their parents were more likely to be unmarried and to live in poverty and had completed fewer years of education than parents in comparison cities. Although they were less likely to have participated in early intervention, they were more likely to express interest in parenting programs. Mothers who gave birth in Newark hospitals were more likely to be depressed, to be obese, and to smoke, but less likely to drink heavily. Fathers were more likely to have histories of incarceration but were also more likely to be involved with their children than were fathers in the other cities, once demographic differences were accounted for.
As part of a volume entitled Welfare Reform and Its Long-Term Consequences for America's Poor (James P. Ziliak, ed., Cambridge University Press), Jean Knab, Irv Garfinkel (Columbia University), Sara McLanahan, Emily Moiduddin, and Cynthia Osborne (University of Texas-Austin) examined the effects of welfare and child support policies on marriage following a non-marital birth. They find that more generous benefits and stepped up efforts to collect child support payments are associated with lower rates of marriage and stricter policies on welfare receipt are associated with higher marriage rates.
Using recent data from the National Survey of Family Growth and the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing studies, Jean Knab and Kristen Harknett (University of Pennsylvania) examine the relationship between marrying before or after a conception and subsequent marital stability among first-time parents. Despite changes in the norms surrounding premarital pregnancy and substantial declines in the likelihood of marrying in response to a non-marital pregnancy, they find that, as in decades past, marriages that began before a conception were more stable than those that began after a conception. While couples that marry before and after a conception are similar in their reported relationship quality at the time of their first birth, they differ in a number of other characteristics, such as race, education, and cohabitation history, which are correlated with marital instability. Couples that marry after conception are also far more likely to have had an unplanned pregnancy, which is also associated with marital instability.
Daniel Notterman, a new faculty associate of OPR, is interested in gene-environment interactions in at-risk women and children. Many complex human phenotypes result from interactions between functional polymorphisms in central nervous system pathways and specific environmental stressors. For example, children exposed to maltreatment or abuse often grow up to develop antisocial behaviors such as violence toward others. However, some children seem protected from this unhappy outcome. Why? One possibility is that these individuals have a functional polymorphism in the neurotransmitter degrading enzyme (MAOA) that increases the enzymes activity. This increase in MAO activity seems to reduce the likelihood of developing violent or other antisocial behavior as an adult. Notterman has begun a collaboration with The Fragile Families and ChildWellbeing Study, which contains detailed measures of key environmental variables including material hardship, neighborhood (or social) disorganization, and stressful family environments. At the nine-year wave of data collection, samples of DNA are being collected from mothers and children (approximately 8,000 samples expected). Notterman's lab is serving as the Core DNA Resource and is developing high-throughput genotyping techniques for evaluating polymorphic genes that may interact with a stressful environment to foster substance abuse, violence, anxiety, and depression. They are preparing to study how the stressful life of the single mother--often from a minority community with limited access to health care and other support systems--interacts with functional genetic polymorphisms to affect her ability to cope with a difficult and stressful environment. One study examines the effect of several gene polymorphisms on substance abuse in the mother; another will test the hypothesis that depression and anxiety syndromes are conditioned by interactions between specific maternal genotypes and the involvement of the father in support and parenting. The long-term goal is to better understand how genetics and environment interact to produce specific types of personality and behavior.
Margot Jackson uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 97 and the British National Child Development Study to study two questions. First, is there variation by social background in the link between health and education, meaning that some children have a more difficult time than others succeeding educationally while struggling with a health condition? Secondly, do students with poorer health have a harder time navigating the hurdles of the educational process, whereby they perform worse and end up in less rigorous academic tracks, with consequences for their eventual socioeconomic attainment? Findings in the U.S. show that the negative educational consequences of poor health are not limited to the most socially disadvantaged adolescents, but are in fact strongest for non-Hispanic white adolescents. The consequences of poor adolescent health in the U.S. therefore span the social spectrum. In both the U.S. and the U.K., she also finds that the experience of a health problem during the educational process increases the likelihood that children will end up in less rigorous educational tracks and perform more poorly, which is in turn related to socioeconomic success in adulthood. The size of predicted gaps in socioeconomic attainment by childhood health are similar to the size of predicted gaps by variables known to play a crucial role in processes of inequality and stratification. The findings therefore emphasize the need to consider the role of early-life health in transmitting inequality across generations.
Margot Jackson and Robert Mare (University of California- Los Angeles) use geocoded data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to develop a method for separating the effects of two neighborhood processes--residential mobility and neighborhood change--on children's wellbeing. Although both processes cause the quality and composition of a child's neighborhood to vary, they do not necessarily have the same influence. Identifying the independent effect of each, if any, is an important step toward fully understanding how much and how characteristics of neighborhoods matter for children.
Alison Buttenheim and co-author Jenna Nobles (University of California-Berkeley) investigates two aspects of marriage in Indonesia using data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey. In a paper forthcoming in Journal of Marriage and Family, they find evidence that wage rates are negatively associated with first marriage among young adults in the 1990s in Indonesia, in contrast to much of the literature on economic determinants of marriage. A second related paper looks at the persistence of ethnic-based nuptial regimes in predicting marriage behavior in the wake of rapid economic development and increased educational attainment in Indonesia. Results suggest that norms continue to influence marriage ages and post-marriage residence in contemporary Indonesia, and, more generally, that ethnic-based nuptial regimes can be critical and persistent determinants of marriage behaviors even as societies rapidly develop.
Jean Grossman, in conjunction with Jean Rhodes (University of Massachusetts-Boston) and Carla Herrera (Public/Private Ventures), developed a set of standardized outcome measures that could be used by all BBBS agencies and other youth mentoring programs to gauge outcomes. The measures included indicators related to academic performance, behavior, psychological wellbeing, parent/peer relationships, and vocational aspirations. The second phase of the study, set for 2008, will test out the measurement package with a set of agencies, having case managers use the instrument to track the progress matches are making over 12 months.
Grossman also examines whether an intensive, well implemented, academically focused, out-of-school-time (OST) program can increase academic performance of disadvantaged fifth- through eighth-grade students and at what cost. Over three years, 1,020 students will be recruited into the study and half will be randomly assigned to receive an offer to participate in an intensive OST program offered by the Higher Achievement Program (HAP) of Washington, DC. HAP provides students four years of summer school, after school programming and high school placement assistance. During 2007, Grossman oversaw the recruitment and randomization of the second and third cohorts of fifth and sixth-graders.
Jointly with Manpower Development and Research Corporation (MDRC), Jean Grossman is designing and is working on the impact evaluation of a multi-organizational project for the U.S. Department of Education. This project involves conducting two parallel random assignment evaluations (each with 2,000 sample members) of reading and math after-school curricula to test the impacts on key student outcomes, especially academic achievement. During 2007, in conjunction with staff at MDRC, she helped analyze the first year of experimental data, including analyzing how the quality of implementation affected the size of the impacts and helped draft the first-year report. She developed the method that was used in the analysis to account for the multiple tests. She also developed the evaluation design for the second year.
Grossman, as co-principal investigator, is designing and conducting a random assignment evaluation of Big Brothers Big Sisters' school-based mentoring program. The study will entail following the lives of approximately 1,000 elementary and middle school students for a year and a half from the time they apply to the program. Grossman directed the analysis of both the end-of-school-year impacts and the 15-month impacts. In addition, she conducted analysis on the association between the length of a school-based match and impacts, as well as the quality/closeness of the mentee-mentor relationship and impacts. Much of the year was also spent writing up these results and conducting follow-up analyses.
As co-principal investigator of a study to determine the cost of high quality out-of-school time programs, Jean Grossman's project entails collecting cost data from hundreds of programs and the development of a "blue book" or a hedonic cost index that can be used to determine the cost of programs with different types of structures and focus (i.e. academic programs, recreational programs, school-based vs. community based, with higher or lower staff-youth ratios, etc.). In 2007, Grossman oversaw the analysis of the program cost data including conducting the "blue book" analysis, and wrote three publications from this data--one on the cost of out of- school time programs, one on city-level costs of strengthening programs, and lastly, the "blue book."
Audrey Beck and colleagues Clara Muschkin and Elizabeth Glennie from Duke University looked at effects of school peers on student behavior, using age, grade retention, and disciplinary infractions in middle school. This study analyzed the influence of old-for-grade and retained peers on the behavior of students in middle school--specifically, the propensity of seventh-graders to engage in deviant behaviors in school. They also examined the propensity for students to receive an out-of-school suspension, one of the more severe consequences for disciplinary infractions. Their findings were consistent with peer influence theories of adolescent behavior. They found that both old-for-grade and retained students were more likely to commit offenses in school and to be suspended, even controlling for demographic, socioeconomic, and organizational characteristics. Furthermore, they found that the proportion of students who were old-for-grade or retained had independent effects on the problematic behavior of other students.
A wealth of empirical evidence has documented that growing up in poverty places children at risk for a wide range of physical, cognitive, and socio-emotional problems. For example, parents and teachers report that low-income children are more likely to be aggressive, to experience symptoms of depression, and to receive lower scores on measures of academic achievement compared to their more affluent peers. Understanding the ways in which poverty affects children's wellbeing, therefore, is an important goal for social science researchers. In the large and growing body of literature on the development of economically disadvantaged children, Carey Cooper examines a powerful explanation for the association between poverty and poor development that has emerged: the family process model. As background, she begins by briefly describing childhood poverty in the United States and the effects of poverty on children's development. She then describes the components of the family process model and reviews research that provides support for the model. Finally, Cooper closes by discussing future directions for research on the family process model.
Carey Cooper and Robert Crosnoe (University of Texas) considered academic risk and resilience in the context of economic disadvantage, examining the associations among such disadvantage, parental involvement in education, and children's academic orientation in a sample of 489 inner-city families. Neither parents' nor children's engagement in the educational system was significantly associated with a multidimensional scale of economic disadvantage after accounting for demographic characteristics and children's academic achievement. The association between parental involvement and academic orientation, however, differed by level of economic disadvantage. In economically disadvantaged families, parental involvement was associated with greater levels of child academic orientation. In other families, parental involvement and academic orientation were inversely associated with each other.
Cooper and Crosnoe, with Marie-Anne Suizzo and Keenan Pituch (University of Texas), using multilevel models of data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Kindergarten Cohort (N = 20,356), found that parental involvement in education partially mediates the association between family poverty and children's math and reading achievement in kindergarten, though differences exist across race. In Asian families, poor and non-poor children have similar levels of achievement. Poverty is not related to black children's participation in extracurricular activities, but these activities are not associated with black children's achievement. Home learning activities predict reading achievement in Hispanic families only. The findings provide support for application of the family process model to educational outcomes during the transition to elementary school and underscore the need to examine developmental models across racial subsets of the population.
One long-range method of alleviating economic stratification in the U.S. is to target the mechanisms by which it disrupts early schooling. Carey Cooper and Robert Crosnoe's study of poor children's transitions into school, studying families and informing policy, drew on insights from multiple disciplines to expand a core developmental perspective--the family process model--in an effort to elucidate family mechanisms and identify their school remedies. The aims of this study were to examine: 1) the degree of economic disparities in early learning gains, 2) whether these disparities were mediated by family adjustment, family relationships, and parenting, and 3) whether such mediators were moderated by school staffing/services and classroom environment. Multilevel models with data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study- Kindergarten Cohort revealed that the accumulation of markers of economic disadvantage--especially poverty and low parent education combined--substantially reduced math/reading test score gains across primary grades. These differences were explained, in part, by differences in children's socio-emotional problems, parenting stress, and parents' provision of stimulating materials and organized activities for children. A triangulation of methods suggested that these effects were robust to observable and unobservable confounds. Although moderation by school factors was the exception rather than the rule, family adjustment factors were more likely than other mediators to be buffered by school resources (e.g., teacher tenure within grade), and parenting factors were more likely to be reinforced by school resources (e.g., programs for parents, classroom computer access). These results suggest that specific combinations of school contexts and family processes might improve the early learning of economically disadvantaged children while not necessarily reducing economic disparities in learning. Although these results could not identify a more general pattern of school buffering against family risks, the larger argument about linking family and school ecologies still holds value for opening dialogue between developmental research on economic inequality and other disciplines of study and, in the process, informing public policy.
Carey Cooper and colleagues Kristin Neff and Althea Woodruff (University of Texas) looked at children's and adolescents' developing perceptions of gender inequality in two studies. The first study examined perceptions of inequality among 272 early, middle, and late adolescents, focusing on the spheres of politics, business, and the home. Results indicated an age-related increase in perceptions of male dominance. Men were seen to have more power and status in politics than in business, while relative equality was seen to exist in the home. The second study included 96 child and adolescent participants aged 7-15, and once again found an increase in general perceptions of male dominance with age. The results suggest that young children are less explicitly aware of gender inequality than might be assumed given their extensive knowledge of power-loaded gender role stereotypes. Source: OPR Annual Reports.
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