Heads of households
Parental Incentives and Early Childhood Achievement: A Field Experiment in Chicago Heights
Roland Fryer, Steven Levitt & John List
NBER Working Paper, August 2015
Abstract:
This article describes a randomized field experiment in which parents were provided financial incentives to engage in behaviors designed to increase early childhood cognitive and executive function skills through a parent academy. Parents were rewarded for attendance at early childhood sessions, completing homework assignments with their children, and for their child’s demonstration of mastery on interim assessments. This intervention had large and statistically significant positive impacts on both cognitive and non-cognitive test scores of Hispanics and Whites, but no impact on Blacks. These differential outcomes across races are not attributable to differences in observable characteristics (e.g. family size, mother’s age, mother’s education) or to the intensity of engagement with the program. Children with above median (pre-treatment) non cognitive scores accrue the most benefits from treatment.
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Does the Gender of Offspring Affect Parental Political Orientation?
Byungkyu Lee & Dalton Conley
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recently, offspring sex has been widely used as a natural experiment and argued to induce changes in political orientation among parents. However, prior results have been contradictory: in the UK, researchers found that having daughters led to parents favoring left-wing political parties and to holding more liberal views on family/gender roles, whereas in the United States scholars found that daughters were associated with more Republican (rightist) party identification and more conservative views on teen sexuality. We propose and examine three plausible explanations to account for these puzzling results using data from the General Social Survey and the European Social Survey; contextual (period/country) differences, heterogeneous treatment effects, and publication bias. In an analysis of thirty-six countries, we obtain null effects of the sex of the first child on party identification as well as on political ideology while ruling out country heterogeneity. Further, we observe no evidence of other heterogeneous treatment effects based on the analysis of Bayesian Additive Regression Tree models. As a corrective to the source of publication bias, we here add comprehensive null findings to the polarized canon of significant results.
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Karen Kramer et al.
Gender Issues, forthcoming
Abstract:
As the potential for more children being raised by single parents increases, so does the societal need to examine this phenomena of single parent earnings and the impact it will have on the ability to support a family above the poverty line. Research suggests a substantial pay gap between men and women, but most research is limited to individuals in traditional families. This study explores income disparity and poverty between single mothers and single fathers across three decades (1990–2010), using a US nationally representative sample. Based on human capital theory, our analysis reveals that single mothers were more likely to be in poverty at far greater rates than single fathers, after controlling for a host of demographic, human capital, and work related variables. We also found that a contributing factor to this disparity is that single mothers were penalized for having more children while single fathers were not. We find that gendered poverty and the gender pay gap narrowed between 1990 and 2000, but have stayed stable since. Overall, human capital decreases the gender income and poverty gap, but a substantial gap still remains. Implications for policy-makers are discussed.
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Kristin Bernard, Robert Simons & Mary Dozier
Child Development, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examined the neurobiology of maternal sensitivity to children's emotions among mothers involved with Child Protective Services (CPS) and low-risk comparison mothers (Mage = 31.6 years). CPS-referred mothers participated in the Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC) intervention or a control intervention. Mothers' event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured while they categorized images of children with crying, laughing, and neutral expressions. CPS-referred ABC mothers (n = 19) and low-risk comparison mothers (n = 30) showed a larger enhancement of ERP responses for emotional faces relative to neutral faces than CPS-referred control mothers (n = 21). Additionally, the magnitude of ERP responses to emotional faces was associated with observed maternal sensitivity. Findings add to the understanding of the neurobiology of deficits in parenting and suggest that these deficits are changeable through a parenting intervention.
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Family Spillovers of Long-Term Care Insurance
Norma Coe, Gopi Shah Goda & Courtney Harold Van Houtven
NBER Working Paper, August 2015
Abstract:
We examine how long-term care insurance (LTCI) affects family outcomes expected to be sensitive to LTCI, including utilization of informal care and spillover effects on children. An instrumental variables approach allows us to address the endogeneity of LTCI coverage. LTCI coverage induces less informal caregiving, suggesting the presence of intra-family moral hazard. We also find that children are less likely to co-reside or live nearby parents with LTCI and more likely to work full-time, suggesting that significant economic gains from private LTCI could accrue to the younger generation.
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Intergenerational Effects of Parents’ Math Anxiety on Children’s Math Achievement and Anxiety
Erin Maloney et al.
Psychological Science, September 2015, Pages 1480-1488
Abstract:
A large field study of children in first and second grade explored how parents’ anxiety about math relates to their children’s math achievement. The goal of the study was to better understand why some students perform worse in math than others. We tested whether parents’ math anxiety predicts their children’s math achievement across the school year. We found that when parents are more math anxious, their children learn significantly less math over the school year and have more math anxiety by the school year’s end — but only if math-anxious parents report providing frequent help with math homework. Notably, when parents reported helping with math homework less often, children’s math achievement and attitudes were not related to parents’ math anxiety. Parents’ math anxiety did not predict children’s reading achievement, which suggests that the effects of parents’ math anxiety are specific to children’s math achievement. These findings provide evidence of a mechanism for intergenerational transmission of low math achievement and high math anxiety.
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Carla Smith Stover et al.
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, November–December 2015, Pages 19–27
Abstract:
Parenting beliefs and attributions can influence parenting behavior. We used an adoption design to examine the associations among perinatal risk and poor birth mother health, adoptive parent appraisals of birth mothers' mental health, and genetic attributions to adoptive parents' feelings and behaviors toward their adopted infants. A sample of 361 pairs of adoptive parents and birth mothers were interviewed using standardized measures when infants were between 4 and 9 months old. Adoptive mothers and fathers were observed during play tasks when their infants were 9 months old. We found that adoptive mothers' and fathers' appraisals of birth mothers' health were associated with perinatal risk and poor birth mother health. Adoptive mothers' appraisals were linked to hostile parenting, after accounting for characteristics of the child that may influence her appraisals and attributions. These associations were not present for adoptive fathers. Genetic attributions were associated with both adoptive mother and fathers' feelings of daily hassles in parenting. These findings have implications for prevention and intervention.
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Christopher Barry & Lauren Lee-Rowland
Personality and Individual Differences, December 2015, Pages 153–157
Abstract:
The present study examined the level of overall self-reported narcissism in cohorts of 16–19 year olds (N = 2696; 2272 males) attending the same 22-week residential program from 2005 to 2014. Fourteen cohorts completed the Narcissistic Personality Inventory for Children (NPIC; Barry, Frick, & Killian, 2003), and 10 of these cohorts completed the Narcissism Scale of the Antisocial Process Screening Device (APSD; Frick & Hare, 2001). Two approaches to analyze scores in relation to year of data collection were employed. There were no significant changes in narcissism from either measure across the study time period. The implications of these findings for considering current generational trends in narcissism and the need for further research on developmental influences of narcissism are discussed.
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Sharing the Burden: The Interpersonal Regulation of Emotional Arousal in Mother−Daughter Dyads
Jessica Lougheed, Peter Koval & Tom Hollenstein
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
According to social baseline theory (Beckes & Coan, 2011), load sharing is a feature of close relationships whereby the burden of emotional distress is distributed across relationship partners. Load sharing varies by physical closeness and relationship quality. We investigated the effect of load sharing on emotional arousal via galvanic skin response, an indicator of sympathetic nervous system arousal, during a social stressor. Social stress was elicited in 66 adolescent girls (Mage = 15 years) using a spontaneous public-speaking task. Mother−daughter dyads reported their relationship quality, and physical closeness was manipulated by having mothers either touch or not touch their daughter’s hand during the performance. We found evidence of load sharing among dyads who held hands, independent of relationship quality. However, without physical contact, load sharing was only evident among dyads with higher relationship quality. Thus, high relationship quality buffers against threat in a similar way to the physical comfort of a loved one.
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Camelia Hostinar, Anna Johnson & Megan Gunnar
Developmental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The goal of the present study was to investigate the role of early social deprivation in shaping the effectiveness of parent support to alleviate hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA)-axis-stress responses of children (ages 8.9–11, M = 9.83 years, SD = .55). The sample was equally divided between children who had been adopted internationally from orphanage care by age 5 (n = 40) and an age- and gender-matched group of nonadopted (NA) children (n = 40). On average, internationally adopted children were invited to the laboratory 7.6 years postadoption (SD = 1.45). We experimentally manipulated the provision of parent support during the 5-min speech preparation period before a modified Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) and examined its effect on levels of salivary cortisol secreted in response to this laboratory stressor. All participants were randomly assigned to receive support from their parent or a stranger. Analyses revealed a significant interaction of support condition and group such that parent support significantly dampened the cortisol-stress response in NA children compared with support from a stranger, whereas the cortisol response curves of postinstitutionalized (PI) children did not differ between the parent- and stranger-support conditions. Cortisol reactivity for PI children in both conditions was lower than that of NA children in the stranger-support condition. Social deprivation during the first few years of life may shape neurobehavioral development in ways that reduce selective responses to caregivers versus strangers.
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Catherine Stamoulis et al.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Rhythmicity is a fundamental property of neural activity at multiple spatiotemporal scales, and associated oscillations represent a critical mechanism for communication and transmission of information across brain regions. During development, these oscillations evolve dynamically as a function of neural maturation and may be modulated by early experiences, positive and/or negative. This study investigated the impact of psychosocial deprivation associated with institutional rearing in early life and the effects of subsequent foster care intervention on developmental trajectories of neural oscillations and their cross-frequency correlations. Longitudinally acquired nontask EEGs from three cohorts of children from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project were analyzed. These included abandoned children initially reared in institutions and subsequently randomized to be placed in foster care or receive care as usual (prolonged institutional rearing) and a group of never-institutionalized children. Oscillation trajectories were estimated from 42 to 96 months, that is, 1–3 years after all children in the intervention arm of the study had been placed in foster care. Significant differences between groups were estimated for the amplitude trajectories of cognitive-related gamma, beta, alpha, and theta oscillations. Similar differences were identified as a function of time spent in institutions, suggesting that increased time spent in psychosocial neglect may have profound and widespread effects on brain activity. Significant group differences in cross-frequency coupling were estimated longitudinally between gamma and lower frequencies as well as alpha and lower frequencies. Lower cross-gamma coupling was estimated at 96 months in the group of children that remained in institutions at that age compared to the other two groups, suggesting potentially impaired communication between local and long-distance brain networks in these children. In contrast, higher cross-alpha coupling was estimated in this group compared to the other two groups at 96 months, suggesting impaired suppression of alpha–theta and alpha–delta activity, which has been associated with neuropsychiatric disorders. Age at foster care placement had a significant positive modulatory effect on alpha and beta trajectories and their mutual coupling, although by 96 months these trajectories remained distinct from those of never-institutionalized children. Overall, these findings suggest that early psychosocial neglect may profoundly impact neural maturation, particularly the evolution of neural oscillations and their interactions across a broad frequency range. These differences may result in widespread deficits across multiple cognitive domains.
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Katie Lawson, Ann Crouter & Susan McHale
Journal of Vocational Behavior, October 2015, Pages 26–35
Abstract:
Gendered occupational segregation remains prevalent across the world. Although research has examined factors contributing to the low number of women in male-typed occupations – namely science, technology, engineering, and math – little longitudinal research has examined the role of childhood experiences in both young women's and men's later gendered occupational attainment. This study addressed this gap in the literature by examining family gender socialization experiences in middle childhood – namely parents' attitudes and work and family life – as contributors to the gender typicality of occupational attainment in young adulthood. Using data collected from mothers, fathers, and children over approximately 15 years, the results revealed that the associations between childhood socialization experiences (~ 10 years old) and occupational attainment (~ 26 years old) depended on the sex of the child. For sons but not daughters, mothers' more traditional attitudes toward women's roles predicted attaining more gender-typed occupations. In addition, spending more time with fathers in childhood predicted daughters attaining less and sons acquiring more gender-typed occupations in young adulthood. Overall, evidence supports the idea that childhood socialization experiences help to shape individuals' career attainment and thus contribute to gender segregation in the labor market.
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Jessica Houston Su, Rachel Dunifon & Sharon Sassler
Demography, August 2015, Pages 1167-1194
Abstract:
Recent decades have seen a significant decline in mid-pregnancy (“shotgun”) marriage, particularly among disadvantaged groups, which has contributed to increasing nonmarital birth rates. Despite public and political concern about this shift, the implications for parenting and child well-being are not known. Drawing on a sample of U.S. black and white mothers with nonmarital conceptions from the NLSY79, our study fills this gap. Using propensity score techniques to address concerns about selection bias, we found that mid-pregnancy marriages were associated with slightly better parenting quality relative to remaining single, although effect sizes were small and limited to marriages that remained intact at the time of child assessment. Mid-pregnancy marriages were not associated with improved children’s behavior or cognitive ability. These findings suggest that the retreat from mid-pregnancy marriage may contribute to increasing inequality in parenting resources for children.
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Emily Rauscher, Dalton Conley & Mark Siegal
Social Science Research, November 2015, Pages 209–220
Abstract:
While research consistently suggests siblings matter for individual outcomes, it remains unclear why. At the same time, studies of genetic effects on health typically correlate variants of a gene with the average level of behavioral or health measures, ignoring more complicated genetic dynamics. Using National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health data, we investigate whether sibling genes moderate individual genetic expression. We compare twin variation in health-related absences and self-rated health by genetic differences at three locations related to dopamine regulation and transport to test sibship-level cross-person gene-gene interactions. Results suggest effects of variation at these genetic locations are moderated by sibling genes. Although the mechanism remains unclear, this evidence is consistent with frequency dependent selection and suggests much genetic research may violate the stable unit treatment value assumption.