Household Instability and Girls' Teen Childbearing.

More than one third of U.S. children spend part of their childhood living with extended family members. By age 18, nearly 40% of U.S. children experience a household change involving a nonparent. Research has found that having extended family or nonrelatives join or leave children's households negatively affects children's educational attainment. I argue that we need new ways of theorizing, conceptualizing, and measuring household changes and their effects on children. I use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and marginal structural models with inverse probability of treatment weighting to estimate the association between household changes involving parents and nonparents and teen childbearing among girls. I find that experiencing household changes involving nonparents and parents during childhood is associated with a significantly higher probability of having a child as a teenager than experiencing no changes. In addition, the association between changes involving parents and teen childbearing is statistically indistinguishable from the association between changes involving nonparents and teen childbearing, suggesting that household composition shifts involving nonparents can be as disruptive to girls as those involving parents.

Changes in Household Composition and Children's Educational Attainment.

Changes in parental romantic relationships are an important component of family instability, but children are exposed to many other changes in the composition of their households that bear on child well-being. Prior research that focused on parental transitions has thus overlooked a substantial source of instability in children's lives. I argue that the instability in children's residential arrangements is characterized by household instability rather than family instability. To evaluate this thesis, I use the 1968-2015 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and time-varying methods for causal inference to test the independent effects of different types of changes in household composition on educational attainment. Experiencing changes involving nonparent, nonsibling household members has a significant negative effect on educational attainment that is similar in magnitude to that for children who experience changes involving residential parents. Measures of parental changes miss the nearly 20 % of children who experience changes involving household members other than parents or siblings. By showing that changes in nonparental household members are both common and consequential experiences for children, I demonstrate the value of conceptualizing the changes to which children are exposed as a product of household instability, rather than simply family instability.

Reconsidering residential mobility: Differential effects on child wellbeing by race and ethnicity.

Residential mobility is a common experience among Americans, especially children. Most previous research finds residential mobility has negative effects on children's educational attainment, delinquency, substance abuse, and physical and mental health. Previous research, however, does not fully explore whether the effect of mobility differs by child race/ethnicity, in part because many of the samples used for these studies were majority white or exclusively non-white or disadvantaged. In addition, previous research rarely fully accounts for factors that predict selection into mobility and that may also be related to the outcome of interest. This study simultaneously addresses both of these limitations by estimating the effect of moving homes on children's emotional and behavioral wellbeing using first difference models and a diverse longitudinal sample from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. I find that, after controlling for a wide range of individual, caregiver, household and neighborhood characteristics, the effects of moving among African American and Latino children are significantly worse than among white children.

Achieving the Middle Ground in an Age of Concentrated Extremes: Mixed Middle-Income Neighborhoods and Emerging Adulthood.

This article focuses on stability and change in "mixed middle-income" neighborhoods. We first analyze variation across nearly two decades for all neighborhoods in the United States and in the Chicago area, particularly. We then analyze a new longitudinal study of almost 700 Chicago adolescents over an 18-year span, including the extent to which they are exposed to different neighborhood income dynamics during the transition to young adulthood. The concentration of income extremes is persistent among neighborhoods, generally, but mixed middle-income neighborhoods are more fluid. Persistence also dominates among individuals, though Latino-Americans are much more likely than African Americans or whites to be exposed to mixed middle-income neighborhoods in the first place and to transition into them over time, even when adjusting for immigrant status, education, income, and residential mobility. The results here enhance our knowledge of the dynamics of income inequality at the neighborhood level, and the endurance of concentrated extremes suggests that policies seeking to promote mixed-income neighborhoods face greater odds than commonly thought.