Mothers' work conditions, income, and parenting of young children.

Objective: In this study, we investigated the interplay of positive work conditions with parenting behaviors across children's first 4 years. Background: Most mothers in the United States are employed in paid work during their children's early years. Research typically has focused on the ways that such employment can conflict with the intensive demands of parenting, but it can also help mothers socially and psychologically during this important period of children's development. Method: Integrating federal survey data on occupational conditions with parenting reports of job flexibility and parenting behaviors from 5,250 mothers in the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, we estimated how work conditions were associated with stimulating and sensitive parenting and whether these associations were stronger for mothers with lower income. Results: Results of autoregressive modeling demonstrated that job flexibility, opportunities for mastery, and opportunities for connection were positively associated with a composite measure of stimulating and sensitive parenting. Significant interactions indicated that many associations were more pronounced for mothers with lower income. Conclusion: Our results build upon prior work, demonstrating that positive work conditions can support parenting during early childhood and that this is especially true for low-income households. Implications: These results bridge the work-family and parenting literatures with important policy implications, such as adopting family-friendly policies within companies.

Mindset × Context: Schools, Classrooms, and the Unequal Translation of Expectations into Math Achievement.

When do adolescents' dreams of promising journeys through high school translate into academic success? This monograph reports the results of a collaborative effort among sociologists and psychologists to systematically examine the role of schools and classrooms in disrupting or facilitating the link between adolescents' expectations for success in math and their subsequent progress in the early high school math curriculum. Our primary focus was on gendered patterns of socioeconomic inequality in math and how they are tethered to the school's peer culture and to students' perceptions of gender stereotyping in the classroom. To do this, this monograph advances Mindset × Context Theory. This orients research on educational equity to the reciprocal influence between students' psychological motivations and their school-based opportunities to enact those motivations. Mindset × Context Theory predicts that a student's mindset will be more strongly linked to developmental outcomes among groups of students who are at risk for poor outcomes, but only in a school or classroom context where there is sufficient need and support for the mindset. Our application of this theory centers on expectations for success in high school math as a foundational belief for students' math progress early in high school. We examine how this mindset varies across interpersonal and cultural dynamics in schools and classrooms. Following this perspective, we ask: 1. Which gender and socioeconomic identity groups showed the weakest or strongest links between expectations for success in math and progress through the math curriculum? 2. How did the school's peer culture shape the links between student expectations for success in math and math progress across gender and socioeconomic identity groups? 3. How did perceptions of classroom gender stereotyping shape the links between student expectations for success in math and math progress across gender and socioeconomic identity groups? We used nationally representative data from about 10,000 U.S. public school 9th graders in the National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM) collected in 2015-2016-the most recent, national, longitudinal study of adolescents' mindsets in U.S. public schools. The sample was representative with respect to a large number of observable characteristics, such as gender, race, ethnicity, English Language Learners (ELLs), free or reduced price lunch, poverty, food stamps, neighborhood income and labor market participation, and school curricular opportunities. This allowed for generalization to the U.S. public school population and for the systematic investigation of school- and classroom-level contextual factors. The NSLM's complete sampling of students within schools also allowed for a comparison of students from different gender and socioeconomic groups with the same expectations in the same educational contexts. To analyze these data, we used the Bayesian Causal Forest (BCF) algorithm, a best-in-class machine-learning method for discovering complex, replicable interaction effects. Chapter IV examined the interplay of expectations, gender, and socioeconomic status (SES; operationalized with maternal educational attainment). Adolescents' expectations for success in math were meaningful predictors of their early math progress, even when controlling for other psychological factors, prior achievement in math, and racial and ethnic identities. Boys from low-SES families were the most vulnerable identity group. They were over three times more likely to not make adequate progress in math from 9th to 10th grade relative to girls from high-SES families. Boys from low-SES families also benefited the most from their expectations for success in math. Overall, these results were consistent with Mindset × Context Theory's predictions. Chapters V and VI examined the moderating role of school-level and classroom-level factors in the patterns reported in Chapter IV. Expectations were least predictive of math progress in the highest-achieving schools and schools with the most academically oriented peer norms, that is, schools with the most formal and informal resources. School resources appeared to compensate for lower levels of expectations. Conversely, expectations most strongly predicted math progress in the low/medium-achieving schools with less academically oriented peers, especially for boys from low-SES families. This chapter aligns with aspects of Mindset × Context Theory. A context that was not already optimally supporting student success was where outcomes for vulnerable students depended the most on student expectations. Finally, perceptions of classroom stereotyping mattered. Perceptions of gender stereotyping predicted less progress in math, but expectations for success in math more strongly predicted progress in classrooms with high perceived stereotyping. Gender stereotyping interactions emerged for all sociodemographic groups except for boys from high-SES families. The findings across these three analytical chapters demonstrate the value of integrating psychological and sociological perspectives to capture multiple levels of schooling. It also drew on the contextual variability afforded by representative sampling and explored the interplay of lab-tested psychological processes (expectations) with field-developed levers of policy intervention (school contexts). This monograph also leverages developmental and ecological insights to identify which groups of students might profit from different efforts to improve educational equity, such as interventions to increase expectations for success in math, or school programs that improve the school or classroom cultures.

Family Formation History and the Psychological Well-Being of Women from Diverse Racial-Ethnic Groups.

Studying disparities in psychological well-being across diverse groups of women can illuminate the racialized health risks of gendered family life. Integrating life course and demand-reward perspectives, this study applied sequencing techniques to the National Longitudinal Study of Youth: 1979 to reveal seven trajectories of partnership and parenthood through women's 20s and 30s, including several in which parenthood followed partnership at different ages and with varying numbers of children and others characterized by nonmarital fertility or eschewing such roles altogether. These sequences differentiated positive and negative dimensions of women's well-being in their 50s. Women who inhabited any family role had greater life satisfaction and fewer depressive symptoms, although these general patterns differed by race-ethnicity. Family roles were more closely related to well-being than ill-being for White women, parenthood had more pronounced importance across outcomes for Black women, and the coupling of partnership and parenthood generally mattered more for Latinas.

Unpacking the linkages between single parent households and early adolescent adjustment.

Living with an unmarried mother is consistently associated with adjustment issues in adolescence, but these associations can vary by both time and place. Following life course theory, this study applied inverse probability of treatment weighting techniques to data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979) Children and Young Adults study (n = 5,597) to estimate various treatment effects of family structures through childhood and early adolescence on internalizing and externalizing dimensions of adjustment at age 14. Young people who lived with an unmarried (single or cohabiting) mother during early childhood and adolescence were more likely to drink and reported more depressive symptoms by age 14 than those with a married mother, with particularly strong associations between living with an unmarried mother during early adolescence and drinking. These associations, however, varied according to sociodemographic selection into family structures. They were strongest for youth who more closely resembled the average adolescent living with a married mother.

Reduced growth mindset as a mechanism linking childhood trauma with academic performance and internalizing psychopathology.

BACKGROUND: Despite the high prevalence of childhood adversity and well-documented associations with poor academic achievement and psychopathology, effective, scalable interventions remain largely unavailable. Existing interventions targeting growth mindset-the belief that personal characteristics are malleable-have been shown to improve academic achievement and symptoms of psychopathology in youth. OBJECTIVE: The present study examines growth mindset as a potential modifiable mechanism underlying the associations of two dimensions of childhood adversity-threat and deprivation-with academic achievement and internalizing psychopathology. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING: Participants were 408 youth aged 10-18 years drawn from one timepoint of two longitudinal studies of community-based samples recruited to have diverse experiences of childhood adversity. METHOD: Experiences of threat and deprivation were assessed using a multi-informant, multi-method approach. Youth reported on growth mindset of intelligence and symptoms of anxiety and depression. Parents provided information about youths' academic performance. RESULTS: Both threat and deprivation were independently associated with lower growth mindset, but when accounting for co-occurring adversities, only the association between threat and lower growth mindset remained significant. Lower growth mindset was associated with worse academic performance and greater symptoms of both anxiety and depression. Finally, there was a significant indirect effect of experiences of threat on both lower academic performance and greater symptoms of anxiety through lower growth mindset. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that growth mindset could be a promising target for efforts aimed at mitigating the impact of childhood adversity on academic achievement and psychopathology given the efficacy of existing brief, scalable growth mindset interventions.

A cross-national comparison of the linkages between family structure histories and early adolescent substance use.

Family structure can influence adolescent health with cascading implications into adulthood. Life course theory emphasizes how this phenomenon is dynamic across time, contextualized in policy systems, and grounded in processes of selection and socialization. This study used data from the U.S. (National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Child and Young Adults, n = 6,236) and U.K. (Millennium Cohort Study, n = 11,095) to examine associations between a single mother family structure between ages 0-14 and early adolescent substance use at age 14 across time and place, using inverse probability of treatment weighting to explore how results varied by selection into family structure. In both countries, single parenthood, regardless of its timing during childhood, consistently predicted adolescent substance use when samples were re-weighted to resemble the overall population. However, when samples were re-weighted so that their background characteristics resembled those of actual single parent families, there was little evidence that single parenting posed risks, suggesting that single parenting might matter less for adolescents who are likely to experience it (and vice versa). In addition, more generous welfare policy in the U.K. than in the U.S. did not appear to have ameliorated the observed role of single parenting in adolescent substance use. Findings supported a model of disadvantage saturation, where single parenting has little additional impact over the myriad other disadvantages that single parent families tend to experience, rather than a model of cumulative disadvantage, where single parenting compounds or adds to other disadvantages. Policy and interventions might more valuably focus on these other disadvantages than on family structure.

Twenty-Five Years of National-Level Research on Adolescent and Young Adult Mental Health in the United States.

The longitudinal, population-level, biosocial data in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) have elucidated the developmental course of mental health across early stages of the life course. This data set also has been invaluable for documenting and unpacking disparities in these developmental patterns by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, immigration, and sexuality. Reflecting the larger focus of this special supplement on Add Health as a tool for connecting adolescence to adulthood, this article reviews Add Health research since 2000 based on a search of key mental health terms, primarily describing patterns of two key markers of psychopathology (depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation) that were consistently measured across waves. It situates these patterns from adolescence into adulthood within the developmental ecology organized by the proximate settings of everyday life, the larger social structures organized by a highly stratified society, and the relations of these ecological and structural forces to biological processes. Major foci are the dynamic nature of mental health across the life course and the ways that ecological and physiological influences on mental health differ by group identity and social position.

The Health of Mothers of Adult Children with Serious Conditions.

Objectives: This study examined the association between parenting adult children with serious conditions and mothers' midlife health in the United States. Background: The literature about the link between the parenting status of having an adult child with a serious condition and maternal wellbeing can be advanced by systematic analysis of the cumulative role that this parenting status can play in maternal health over the life course as opposed to at any one point. Method: Propensity score reweighting models of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 and its linked child and young adult data estimated disparities in midlife health among mothers of adult children with serious conditions (disabilities, developmental disorders, chronic diseases) and mothers of typically developing children, including examining variation by how long mothers had been in this parenting role and moderation by maternal education and marital status. Results: Mothers of young adult children with serious conditions had poorer physical (but not mental) health at midlife than other mothers, especially when more years had elapsed since the child was diagnosed with or developed the condition. These patterns did not differ by maternal education and marital status. Conclusion: The dynamics of epidemiological risk and protection among parents of children with serious conditions were temporally situated in the maternal life course but were consistent across different segments of the maternal population.

The Developmental Significance of Looks from Middle Childhood to Early Adolescence.

Physical appearance during the transition into adolescence matters for youths' socioemotional development. This study explored these implications by adding visual data to the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (n = 1,049) to test how others' ratings of youths' looks (1 = very unattractive to 5 = very attractive) at the beginning (grade 3) and end (grade 9) of this transition shaped their emotional well-being, popularity/likability, and dating/sexual behavior. Results revealed recency effects of grade 9 looks on popularity/likability and dating/sexual behaviors and a lingering amplification effect of grade 3 looks on popularity/likability at the start of high school. Few associations were evident for emotional well-being. Thus, physical appearance offers an important lens for studying adolescent development.

Teacher Mindsets Help Explain Where a Growth-Mindset Intervention Does and Doesn't Work.

A growth-mindset intervention teaches the belief that intellectual abilities can be developed. Where does the intervention work best? Prior research examined school-level moderators using data from the National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM), which delivered a short growth-mindset intervention during the first year of high school. In the present research, we used data from the NSLM to examine moderation by teachers' mindsets and answer a new question: Can students independently implement their growth mindsets in virtually any classroom culture, or must students' growth mindsets be supported by their teacher's own growth mindsets (i.e., the mindset-plus-supportive-context hypothesis)? The present analysis (9,167 student records matched with 223 math teachers) supported the latter hypothesis. This result stood up to potentially confounding teacher factors and to a conservative Bayesian analysis. Thus, sustaining growth-mindset effects may require contextual supports that allow the proffered beliefs to take root and flourish.

School-based extracurricular activity involvement and high school dropout among at-risk students: Consistency matters.

Encouraging involvement in school-based extracurricular activities (ECA) may be important for preventing high school dropout. However, the potential of these activities remains underexploited, perhaps because studies linking ECA involvement and dropout are rare and based on decades-old data. Previous studies also ignore key parameters of student involvement. The present study expands and updates this limited literature by using recent data from a high-risk Canadian sample (N = 545) and by considering a range of involvement parameters. Results showed that consistent involvement in the past year was associated with lower odds of dropout (OR = 0.32; 95% CI = 0.17-0.61). However, adolescents who interrupted their involvement during this period (e.g., because of cancelations or exclusions) were as much at risk of dropout as those who were not involved at all. Findings notably imply that excluding students from ECA (e.g., because of No Pass/No Play policies) may heighten their dropout risk.

The development of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) efficacy and identity among Mexican-origin youth across Latino/a destinations.

Persistence in high school curricula leading to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers is structured by complex institutional systems, but developmental processes underlie how young people navigate these systems. This study examined differences in the development of STEM identity and efficacy during high school among Mexican-origin youth-a large and fast-growing demographic group that shows developmental assets and risks. Contextualizing development within larger community structures, this examination focused on the diverse array of destinations throughout the United States where Mexican-origin youth are living as contexts for their STEM identity and efficacy development. Drawing on a dataset integrating the High School Longitudinal study of 2009; Civil Rights Data Collection, decennial U.S. censuses, and the American Community Survey, multilevel models revealed variability in Mexican-origin math/science identity and efficacy development across destinations. Mexican-origin youth in established destinations had higher net growth in math identity but lower net growth in science efficacy than Whites in established destinations. Mexican-origin youth in new destinations followed similar trajectories as their Mexican-origin peers in established destinations but had lower net growth in science identity. Additionally, these patterns varied by immigrant generation. Mexican-origin youth who were the U.S.-born children of immigrants in established destinations had higher net growth in math identity than Whites in established destinations, but this generational group in new destinations had lower net growth in math identity, science identity, and science efficacy than these peers. These findings highlight the importance of communities and their embedded ecological contexts in shaping STEM identity and efficacy among Mexican-origin youth. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Contextualizing the Social and Educational Journeys of Adolescents within the Life Course.

What happens during adolescence emerges from early in life and sets the stage for later in life. This linking function of adolescence within the life course is grounded in social, psychological, and biological development and is fundamental to the intergenerational transmission of societal inequalities. This article explores this life course phenomenon by focusing on how the social ups and downs of secondary school shape adolescents' educational trajectories, translating their backgrounds into their futures through the interplay of their personal agency with the constraints imposed by the stratified institutions they navigate. Illustrative examples include gender differences in risky behavior, racialized experiences of school discipline, immigrant youths' family relations, LGBTQ students' school safety, STEM education, adverse childhood experiences, and mindset interventions.

Maternal Education and Early Childhood Education across Affluent English-Speaking Countries.

Women who attain more education tend to have children with more educational opportunities, a transmission of educational advantages across generations that is embedded in the larger structures of families' societies. Investigating such country-level variation with a life course model, this study estimated associations of mothers' educational attainment with their young children's enrollment in early childhood education and engagement in cognitively stimulating activities in a pooled sample of 36,400 children (n = 17,900 girls, 18,500 boys) drawn from nationally representative datasets from Australia, Ireland, United Kingdom, and United States. Results showed that having a mother with a college degree generally differentiated young children on these two outcomes more in the United States, potentially reflecting processes related to strong relative advantage (i.e., maternal education matters more in populations with lower rates of women's educational attainment) and weak contingent protection (i.e., it matters more in societies with less policy investment in families).

Understanding The Health Landscapes Where Latinx Immigrants Establish Residence In The US.

The diversity of health contexts in which members of the US Latinx population establish residence may provide insights into the variety of health challenges they face. We investigated differences in health professional shortages, general health services, health care safety-net supply, health access, and population health rankings across 3,113 US counties classified as established, new, or other Latinx population destinations. Compared with new destinations, established destinations had more health professional shortages, as well as higher rates of child and adult health uninsurance. New destinations had fewer health care safety-net services per 100,000 county residents than established destinations. Health contexts thus differ in significant ways across new and established Latinx destinations, and these differences have key implications for Latinx immigrant health.

Concentrated Poverty in U.S. Schools and Adolescents' Risk of Being Overweight.

The economic segregation of U.S. schools undermines the academic performance of students, particularly students from low-income families who are often concentrated in high-poverty schools. Yet it also fuels the reproduction of inequality by harming their physical health. Integrating research on school effects with social psychological and ecological theories on how local contexts shape life course outcomes, we examined a conceptual model linking school poverty and adolescent students' weight. Applying multilevel modeling techniques to the first wave of data (1994-1995) from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health; n = 18,924), the results revealed that individual students' likelihood of being overweight increased as the concentration of students from low-income families in their schools increased, net of their own background characteristics. This linkage was connected to a key contextual factor: the exposure of students in high-poverty schools to other overweight students. This exposure may partly matter because of the lower prevalence of dieting norms in such schools, although future research should continue to examine potential mechanisms.

Family Structure and Secondary Exposure to Violence in the Context of Varying Neighborhood Risks and Resources.

Secondary exposure to violence in the community is a prevalent developmental risk with implications for youths' short- and long-term socioemotional functioning. This study used longitudinal, multilevel data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods to consider how family structure, including parental instability, is associated with youths' secondary exposure to violence across diverse neighborhood contexts. Results showed that both living in a stable single-parent household and experiencing parental instability were associated with greater secondary exposure to violence compared with living in a stable two-parent household. The associations between having a single parent or experiencing parental instability and secondary exposure to violence were especially strong in neighborhoods with high levels of crime and strong neighborhood ties.

How can we inspire nations of learners? An investigation of growth mindset and challenge-seeking in two countries.

Here we evaluate the potential for growth mindset interventions (that teach students that intellectual abilities can be developed) to inspire adolescents to be "learners"-that is, to seek out challenging learning experiences. In a previous analysis, the U.S. National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM) showed that a growth mindset could improve the grades of lower-achieving adolescents, and, in an exploratory analysis, increase enrollment in advanced math courses across achievement levels. Yet, the importance of being a "learner" in today's global economy requires clarification and replication of potential challenge-seeking effects, as well as an investigation of the school affordances that make intervention effects on challenge-seeking possible. To this end, the present article presents new analyses of the U.S. NSLM (N = 14,472) to (a) validate a standardized, behavioral measure of challenge-seeking (the "make-a-math worksheet" task), and (b) show that the growth mindset treatment increased challenge-seeking on this task. Second, a new experiment conducted with nearly all schools in 2 counties in Norway, the U-say experiment (N = 6,541), replicated the effects of the growth mindset intervention on the behavioral challenge-seeking task and on increased advanced math course-enrollment rates. Treated students took (and subsequently passed) advanced math at a higher rate. Critically, the U-say experiment provided the first direct evidence that a structural factor-school policies governing when and how students opt in to advanced math-can afford students the possibility of profiting from a growth mindset intervention or not. These results highlight the importance of motivational research that goes beyond grades or performance alone and focuses on challenge-seeking. The findings also call attention to the affordances of school contexts that interact with student motivation to promote better achievement and economic trajectories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Predictors and consequences of school mobility in middle childhood.

In this prospective longitudinal study (N = 1094, M age = 5.6 years to M age = 11.1 years), we examined family factors associated with school mobility and then asked if either a move during the previous year or cumulative moves across elementary school were related to child functioning. Family factors were not linked to a recent move or a single move, but changes in family income and household structure did predict higher odds of two or more moves in elementary school. There was no evidence that a recent move or a single move was related to children's academic or social functioning. Effects of two or more moves on child functioning were not significant after controlling for the number of analyses that were conducted. Taken together, school mobility during elementary school did not appear to be a pervasive risk although we were unable to study very high rates of school mobility because of very small sample sizes.

Preliminary Findings of the Links Between Gender Role Attitudes and Sexual Behaviors in Mexican American Early Adolescent Boys.

This study explored the relations between Latino gender role attitudes (traditional machismo attitudes and caballerismo attitudes) and sexual behaviors among 242 Mexican American early adolescent boys in the southwest United States. Specifically, a multiple mediator model estimated the association between gender role attitudes and sexual activity through a mediational pathway connecting substance use, sexual motives, and peer influence. Results from analyzing this structural equation model indicated that traditional machismo attitudes were not associated with sexual behaviors. Caballerismo gender role attitudes, however, were indirectly linked with reduced sexual motives and substance via peer influence. This study underscores the importance of social context, behavior, and psychological motivations in explaining differences in sexual motives and substance use among young Mexican American adolescent boys who hold different kinds of beliefs about their gender.