Welfare Reform and the Quality of Young Children's Home Environments.

This study investigates the effects of welfare reform-a major policy shift in the United States that increased low-income mothers' employment and reliance on earnings instead of cash assistance-on the quality of the home environments mothers provide for their preschool-age children. Using empirical methods designed to identify plausibly causal effects, we estimate the effects of welfare reform on validated survey and observational measures of maternal behaviors that support children's cognitive skills and emotional adjustment and the material goods that parents purchase to stimulate their children's skill development. The results suggest that welfare reform did not affect the amount of time and material resources mothers devoted to cognitively stimulating activities with their young children. However, it significantly decreased emotional support provision scores, by approximately 0.3-0.4 standard deviations. The effects appear to be stronger for mothers with lower human capital. The findings provide evidence that welfare reform came at a cost to children in the form of lower quality parenting. They also underscore the importance of considering quality, and not just quantity, in assessing the effects of maternal work-incentive policies on parenting and children's home environments.

Effects of Welfare Reform on Positive Health and Social Behaviors of Adolescents.

This paper explores a missing link in the literature on welfare reform in the U.S.-the effects on positive health and social behaviors of adolescents, who represent the next generation of potential welfare recipients. Previous research on welfare reform and adolescents has focused almost exclusively on negative behaviors and found that welfare reform led to decreases in high school dropout and teenage fertility among girls, but increases in delinquent behaviors and substance use, particularly among boys. Using nationally representative data on American high school students in 1991-2006 and a quasi-experimental research design, we estimated the effects of welfare reform implementation on eating breakfast, regular fruit/vegetable consumption, regular exercise, adequate sleep, time spent on homework, completion of assignments, participation in community activities or volunteering, participation in school athletics, participation in other school activities, and religious service attendance. We found no robust evidence that welfare reform affected any of these adolescent behaviors. In concert with the past research on welfare reform in the U.S. and adolescents, the findings do not support the implicit assumption underlying welfare reform that strong maternal work incentives would increase responsible behavior in the next generation and suggest that welfare reform had overall adverse effects on boys, who have been falling behind girls in terms of high school completion for decades.

INTERGENERATIONAL EFFECTS OF WELFARE REFORM: ADOLESCENT DELINQUENT AND RISKY BEHAVIORS.

This study investigates effects of welfare reform in the United States on the next generation. Most previous studies of effects of welfare reform on adolescents focused on high-school dropout of girls or fertility; little is known about how welfare reform has affected other teenage behaviors or boys. We use a difference-in-difference-in-differences framework to identify gender-specific effects of welfare reform on skipping school, fighting, damaging property, stealing, hurting others, smoking, alcohol, marijuana, and other illicit drugs. Welfare reform led to increases in delinquent behaviors of boys as well as increases in substance use of boys and girls, with substantially larger effects for boys.

The Effect of Mother-Child Reading Time on Children's Reading Skills: Evidence From Natural Within-Family Variation.

Children's exposure to book reading is thought to be an influential input into positive cognitive development. Yet there is little empirical research identifying whether it is reading time per se, or other factors associated with families who read, such as parental education or children's reading skill, that improves children's achievement. Using data on 4,239 children ages 0-13 of the female respondents of the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this study applies two different methodologies to identify the causal impact of mother-child reading time on children's achievement scores by controlling for several confounding child and family characteristics. The results show that a 1 SD increase in mother-child reading time increases children's reading achievement by 0.80 SDs.

Maternal Age and Child Development.

Although the consequences of teen births for both mothers and children have been studied for decades, few studies have taken a broader look at the potential payoffs-and drawbacks-of being born to older mothers. A broader examination is important given the growing gap in maternal ages at birth for children born to mothers with low and high socioeconomic status. Drawing data from the Children of the NLSY79, our examination of this topic distinguishes between the value for children of being born to a mother who delayed her first birth and the value of the additional years between her first birth and the birth of the child whose achievements and behaviors at ages 10-13 are under study. We find that each year the mother delays a first birth is associated with a 0.02 to 0.04 standard deviation increase in school achievement and a similar-sized reduction in behavior problems. Coefficients are generally as large for additional years between the first and given birth. Results are fairly robust to the inclusion of cousin and sibling fixed effects, which attempt to address some omitted variable concerns. Our mediational analyses show that the primary pathway by which delaying first births benefits children is by enabling mothers to complete more years of schooling.

Parental Income and Children's Life Course: Lessons from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

This article reviews how the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has contributed to our understanding of the links between childhood economic conditions- in particular, the household incomes with very young children-and the economic attainment and health of those children when they reach adulthood. From its beginning, the PSID has provided data useful for addressing intergenerational questions. In the mid-1990s, PSID data supported a series of studies that link early childhood income to early adult attainments, particularly to completed schooling. At the same time, discoveries in neurobiology and epidemiology were beginning to provide details on the processes producing the observed correlations. These discoveries led to a more recent set of PSID-based studies that focus not only on labor market and behavioral outcomes, but also on links between income in the earliest stages of life (including the prenatal period) and adult health. Links between economic disadvantage in childhood and adult health, and the developmental neuroscience underlying those links, are promising areas for future research.

Effects of Maternal Work Incentives on Teen Drug Arrests.

PURPOSE: This study exploits differences in the implementation of welfare reform across states and over time in the United States in the attempt to identify causal effects of welfare reform on youth arrests for drug-related crimes between 1990 and 2005, the period during which welfare reform unfolded. METHODOLOGY: Using monthly arrest data from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports, we estimate the effects of welfare reform implementation on drug-related arrests among 15-17 year olds in the United States between 1990 and 2005. We use a difference-in-differences (DD) approach that exploits the implementation of welfare reform across states and over time to estimate effects for teens exposed to welfare reform. FINDINGS: The findings, based on numerous different model specifications, suggest that welfare reform had no statistically significant effect on teen drug arrests. Most estimates were positive and suggestive of a small (3%) increase in arrests. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: This study investigated the effects of a broad-based policy change that altered maternal employment, family income, and other family characteristics on youth drug arrests.

Increasing Inequality in Parent Incomes and Children's Schooling.

Income inequality and the achievement test score gap between high- and low-income children increased dramatically in the United States beginning in the 1970s. This article investigates the demographic (family income, mother's education, family size, two-parent family structure, and age of mother at birth) underpinnings of the growing income-based gap in schooling using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Across 31 cohorts, we find that increases in the income gap between high- and low-income children account for approximately three-quarters of the increasing gap in completed schooling, one-half of the gap in college attendance, and one-fifth of the gap in college graduation. We find no consistent evidence of increases in the estimated associations between parental income and children's completed schooling. Increasing gaps in the two-parent family structures of high- and low-income families accounted for relatively little of the schooling gap because our estimates of the (regression-adjusted) associations between family structure and schooling were surprisingly small for much of our accounting period. On the other hand, increasing gaps in mother's age at the time of birth accounts for a substantial portion of the increasing schooling gap: mother's age is consistently predictive of children's completed schooling, and the maternal age gap for children born into low- and high-income families increased considerably over the period.

Effects of Maternal Work Incentives on Youth Crime.

This study exploits differences in the implementation of welfare reform across states and over time to identify causal effects of maternal work incentives, and by inference employment, on youth arrests between 1988 and 2005, the period of time during which welfare reform unfolded. We consider both serious and minor crimes as classified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, consider differential effects by the youth's gender and age, investigate the extent to which effects were stronger in states with more stringent work incentive policies and larger welfare caseload declines, and use a number of different model specifications to assess robustness and patterns. We find that welfare reform led to reduced arrests for minor crime among youth ages 15-17 years by 9-11 %, with similar estimates for males and females, but that it did not affect youth arrests for serious crimes. The results from this study add to a scant knowledge base about the effects of maternal employment on adolescent behavior by exploiting a large-scale social experiment that greatly increased employment of low-skilled women. The results also provide some support for the widely-embraced argument that welfare reform would discourage undesirable social behavior, not only of mothers, but also of the next generation.

Socioeconomic Gaps in Parents' Discipline Strategies From 1988 to 2011.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The prevalence of corporal punishment is high in the United States despite a 1998 American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement urging against its use. The current study tests whether the socioeconomic difference in its use by parents has changed over the past quarter century. It goes on to test whether socioeconomic differences in the use of nonphysical discipline have also changed over time. METHODS: Data are drawn from 4 national studies conducted between 1988 and 2011. Each asked how often a kindergarten-aged child was spanked in the past week and what the parents would do if the child misbehaved, with physical discipline, time-out, and talking to child as possible responses. We use regression models to estimate parents' responses to these questions at the 90th, 50th, and 10th percentiles of the income and education distributions and t tests to compare estimates across cohorts. RESULTS: The proportion of mothers at the 50th income-percentile who endorse physical discipline decreased from 46% to 21% over time. Gaps between the 90th and 10th income-percentiles were stable at 11 and 18 percentage points in 1988 and 2011. The percentage of mothers at the 10th income-percentile endorsing time-outs increased from 51% to 71%, and the 90/10 income gap decreased from 23 to 14 percentage points between 1998 and 2011. CONCLUSIONS: Decline in popular support for physical discipline reflects real changes in parents' discipline strategies. These changes have occurred at all socioeconomic levels, producing for some behaviors a significant reduction in socioeconomic differences.

Work Hours, Schedules, and Insufficient Sleep Among Mothers and Their Young Children.

Studies have linked parents' employment, work hours, and work schedules to their own sleep quality and quantity, but it is unclear whether these associations extend to children. The authors used data from the 5-year in-home survey of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 1,818) to examine the associations between maternal work hours and schedule and insufficient sleep among disadvantaged mothers and their young children. They found that mothers who worked more than 35 hours per week were more likely to experience insufficient sleep compared to mothers who worked fewer hours, whereas children were more likely to experience insufficient sleep when their mothers worked between 20 and 40 hours. Nonstandard work schedules were associated with an increased likelihood of insufficient sleep for mothers but not their children. The results highlight a potentially difficult balance between work and family for many disadvantaged working mothers in the United States.

Measuring Maternal Nonstandard Work in Survey Data.

Surveys differ in the measurement of nonstandard work, such that some surveys require respondents to indicate whether they work either a standard or a nonstandard schedule, whereas others allow respondents to indicate that they work both types of schedules. We test whether these measurement decisions influence the estimated prevalence of maternal nonstandard work, using data from two sources: the Current Population Survey (N = 1,430) and the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 2,524). Using propensity score techniques, we find that giving respondents the option of reporting work at more than one type of schedule doubles the prevalence of nonstandard work, compared to allowing respondents to indicate only one type of schedule. Our results suggest that many mothers of young children regularly work at both standard and nonstandard times and that mutually exclusive conceptualizations of standard and nonstandard work schedules do not fully capture their experiences.

Mothers' night work and children's behavior problems.

Many mothers work in jobs with nonstandard schedules (i.e., schedules that involve work outside of the traditional 9-5, Monday through Friday schedule); this is particularly true for economically disadvantaged mothers. In the present article, we used longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey (n = 2,367 mothers of children ages 3-5 years) to examine the associations between maternal nonstandard work and children's behavior problems, with a particular focus on mothers' night shift work. We employed 3 analytic strategies with various approaches to adjusting for observed and unobserved selection factors; these approaches provided an upper and lower bound on the true relationship between night shift work and children's behavior. Taken together, the results provide suggestive evidence for modest associations between exposure to maternal night shift work and higher levels of aggressive and anxious or depressed behavior in children compared with children whose mothers who are not working, those whose mothers work other types of nonstandard shifts, and, for aggressive behavior, those whose mothers work standard shifts.

Parental employment and children's body weight: Mothers, others, and mechanisms.

A robust body of literature spanning several countries indicates a positive association between maternal employment and child body mass index (BMI). Fewer studies have examined the role of paternal employment. More importantly, little empirical work examines the mechanisms that might explain the relationships between parental employment and children's BMI. Our paper tests the relationship between the cumulative experience of maternal and spouse employment over a child's lifetime and that child's BMI, overweight, and obesity at age 13 or 14. We further examine several mechanisms that may explain these associations. We use data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) merged mother-child file on cohorts of children who were born during a period of dramatic increase in both childhood obesity and maternal employment. We find that the number of hours that highly-educated mothers work over her child's lifetime is positively and statistically significantly associated with her child's BMI and risk of overweight at ages 13 or 14. The work hours of mothers' spouses and partners, on the other hand, are not significantly associated with these outcomes. Results suggest that, for children of highly-educated mothers, the association between maternal work hours and child BMI is partially mediated by television viewing time.

Early childhood poverty, immune-mediated disease processes, and adult productivity.

This study seeks to understand whether poverty very early in life is associated with early-onset adult conditions related to immune-mediated chronic diseases. It also tests the role that these immune-mediated chronic diseases may play in accounting for the associations between early poverty and adult productivity. Data (n = 1,070) come from the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics and include economic conditions in utero and throughout childhood and adolescence coupled with adult (age 30-41 y) self-reports of health and economic productivity. Results show that low income, particularly in very early childhood (between the prenatal and second year of life), is associated with increases in early-adult hypertension, arthritis, and limitations on activities of daily living. Moreover, these relationships and particularly arthritis partially account for the associations between early childhood poverty and adult productivity as measured by adult work hours and earnings. The results suggest that the associations between early childhood poverty and these adult disease states may be immune-mediated.

Health and medical care among the children of immigrants.

Using data spanning 1996-2009 from multiple panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, this study investigates children's (average age 8.5 years) physical health, dental visits, and doctor contact among low-income children (n=46,148) in immigrant versus native households. Immigrant households are further distinguished by household citizenship and immigration status. The findings show that children residing in households with non-naturalized citizen parents, particularly those with a nonpermanent resident parent, experience worse health and less access to care even when controlling for important demographic, socioeconomic, and health insurance variables.

Diverging destinies: maternal education and the developmental gradient in time with children.

Using data from the 2003-2007 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS), we compare mothers' (N = 6,640) time spent in four parenting activities across maternal education and child age subgroups. We test the hypothesis that highly educated mothers not only spend more time in active child care than less-educated mothers but also alter the composition of that time to suit children's developmental needs more than less-educated mothers. Results support this hypothesis: not only do highly educated mothers invest more time in basic care and play when youngest children are infants or toddlers than when children are older, but differences across education groups in basic care and play time are largest among mothers with infants or toddlers; by contrast, highly educated mothers invest more time in management activities when children are 6 to 13 years old than when children are younger, and differences across education groups in management are largest among mothers with school-aged children. These patterns indicate that the education gradient in mothers' time with children is characterized by a "developmental gradient."

Employment patterns of less-skilled workers: links to children's behavior and academic progress.

Using data from five waves of the Women's Employment Survey (WES; 1997-2003), we examine the links between low-income mothers' employment patterns and the emotional behavior and academic progress of their children. We find robust and substantively important linkages between several different dimensions of mothers' employment experiences and child outcomes. The pattern of results is similar across empirical approaches-including ordinary least squares and child fixed-effect models, with and without an extensive set of controls. Children exhibit fewer behavior problems when mothers work and experience job stability (relative to children whose mothers do not work). In contrast, maternal work accompanied by job instability is associated with significantly higher child behavior problems (relative to employment in a stable job). Children whose mothers work full-time and/or have fluctuating work schedules also exhibit significantly higher levels of behavior problems. However, full-time work has negative consequences for children only when it is in jobs that do not require cognitive skills. Such negative consequences are completely offset when this work experience is in jobs that require the cognitive skills that lead to higher wage growth prospects. Finally, fluctuating work schedules and full-time work in non-cognitively demanding jobs are each strongly associated with the probability that the child will repeat a grade or be placed in special education.

Divorced fathers' proximity and children's long-run outcomes: evidence from Norwegian registry data.

This study examines the link between divorced nonresident fathers' proximity and children's long-run outcomes, using high-quality data from Norwegian population registers. We follow (from birth to young adulthood) each of 15,992 children born into married households in Norway in the years 1975-1979 whose parents divorced during his or her childhood. We observe the proximity of the child to his or her father in each year following the divorce and link proximity to educational and economic outcomes for the child in young adulthood, controlling for a wide range of observable characteristics of the parents and the child. Our results show that closer proximity to the father following a divorce has, on average, a modest negative association with offspring's outcomes in young adulthood. The negative associations are stronger among children of highly educated fathers. Complementary Norwegian survey data show that highly educated fathers report more post-divorce conflict with their ex-wives as well as more contact with their children (measured in terms of the number of nights that the child spends at the father's house). Consequently, the father's relocation to a more distant location following the divorce may shelter the child from disruptions in the structure of the child's life as they split time between households and/or from post-divorce interparental conflict.

Parental job loss and children's educational attainment in black and white middle-class families.

Objectives. We aim to understand why blacks are significantly less likely than whites to perpetuate their middle-class status across generations. To do so, we focus on the potentially different associations between parental job loss and youth's educational attainment in black and white middle-class families.Methods. We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), following those children "born" into the survey between 1968 and 1979 and followed through age 21. We conduct multivariate regression analyses to test the association between parental job loss during childhood and youth's educational attainment by age 21.Results. We find that parental job loss is associated with a lesser likelihood of obtaining any postsecondary education for all offspring, but that the association for blacks is almost three times as strong. A substantial share of the differential impact of job loss on black and white middle-class youth is explained by race differences in household wealth, long-run measures of family income, and, especially, parental experience of long-term unemployment.Conclusions. These findings highlight the fragile economic foundation of the black middle class and suggest that intergenerational persistence of class status in this population may be highly dependent on the avoidance of common economic shocks.