Home Life
Kids These Days: Are Face-to-Face Social Skills among American Children Declining?
Douglas Downey & Benjamin Gibbs
American Journal of Sociology, January 2020, Pages 1030-1083
Abstract:
Many social commentators posit that children’s social skills are declining as a result of exposure to technology. But this claim is difficult to assess empirically because it is challenging to measure “social skills” with confidence and because a strong test would employ nationally representative data of multiple cohorts. No scholarship currently meets these criteria. The authors fill that gap by comparing teachers’ and parents’ evaluations of children’s social skills among children in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study 1998 and 2010 cohorts. The authors find no evidence that teachers or parents rate children’s face-to-face social skills as poorer among more recent cohorts, even when accounting for family characteristics, screen time use, and other factors. In addition, within cohorts, children with heavy exposure to screens exhibit similar social skills trajectories compared to children with little exposure to screens. There is a notable exception—social skills are lower for children who access online gaming and social networking many times a day. Overall, however, the results represent a challenge to the dominant narrative that social skills are declining due to technological change.
Family First or the Kindness of Strangers? Foster Care Placements and Adult Outcomes
Nicholas Lovett & Yuhan Xue
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We evaluate the long-run effects of placing foster children with extended family, rather than unrelated caregivers. An instrumental variable identification strategy is used to estimate the effects of kinship care relative to traditional foster care. We find former foster youth placed with kin benefit across a host of important adult outcomes, including increases in employment and education, and reductions in public assistance, homelessness, and incarceration. Estimated effects are statistically significant, and robust to multiple specifications. Findings suggest kinship care has the potential to improve important adult outcomes for a large, at-risk population and create large social cost savings.
The First 2,000 Days and Child Skills
Orla Doyle
Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using a randomized experiment, this study investigates the impact of sustained investment in parenting, from pregnancy until age 5, in the context of extensive welfare provision. Providing the Preparing for Life program, incorporating home visiting, group parenting, and baby massage, to disadvantaged Irish families raised children’s cognitive and socioemotional/behavioral scores by two-thirds and one-quarter of a standard deviation, respectively. There were few differential effects by gender and stronger gains for firstborns and lower-resource households. The program also narrowed the socioeconomic gap in children’s skills. Analyses account for small sample size, differential attrition, multiple testing, contamination, and performance bias.
Comparison of Adopted and Nonadopted Individuals Reveals Gene–Environment Interplay for Education in the UK Biobank
Rosa Cheesman et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Polygenic scores now explain approximately 10% of the variation in educational attainment. However, they capture not only genetic propensity but also information about the family environment. This is because of passive gene–environment correlation, whereby the correlation between offspring and parent genotypes results in an association between offspring genotypes and the rearing environment. We measured passive gene–environment correlation using information on 6,311 adoptees in the UK Biobank. Adoptees’ genotypes were less correlated with their rearing environments because they did not share genes with their adoptive parents. We found that polygenic scores were twice as predictive of years of education in nonadopted individuals compared with adoptees (R2s = .074 vs. .037, p = 8.23 × 10−24). Individuals in the lowest decile of polygenic scores for education attained significantly more education if they were adopted, possibly because of educationally supportive adoptive environments. Overall, these results suggest that genetic influences on education are mediated via the home environment.
Kids These Days! Increasing delay of gratification ability over the past 50 years in children
John Protzko
Intelligence, forthcoming
Abstract:
Have children's ability to delay gratification decreased since the past? We analyze the past 50 years of data on the Marshmallow test of delay of gratification; where children must wait to get two preferred treats of their choosing; if they cannot wait, they only get one. Here we provide comprehensive evidence on whether children's ability to delay gratification has truly been decreasing, as theories of technology or a culture of instant gratification have predicted. Before analyzing the data, we polled 260 experts in cognitive development, 84% of who believed children are getting worse or are no different than those of the past. Contrary to this prediction, we show delay of gratification times are increasing over the past 50 years, corresponding to a fifth of a standard deviation increase in ability per decade. This mirrors the magnitude of secular gains in IQ seen over decades.
Measuring the predictability of life outcomes with a scientific mass collaboration
Matthew Salganik et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 14 April 2020, Pages 8398-8403
Abstract:
How predictable are life trajectories? We investigated this question with a scientific mass collaboration using the common task method; 160 teams built predictive models for six life outcomes using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a high-quality birth cohort study. Despite using a rich dataset and applying machine-learning methods optimized for prediction, the best predictions were not very accurate and were only slightly better than those from a simple benchmark model. Within each outcome, prediction error was strongly associated with the family being predicted and weakly associated with the technique used to generate the prediction. Overall, these results suggest practical limits to the predictability of life outcomes in some settings and illustrate the value of mass collaborations in the social sciences.
Comparing Prospective and Retrospective Reports of Pregnancy Intention in a Longitudinal Cohort of U.S. Women
Lauren Ralph, Diana Greene Foster & Corinne Rocca
Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, March 2020, Pages 39-48
Methods: Longitudinal data collected between 2010 and 2015 on 174 pregnancies were used to analyze the magnitude and direction of changes in intendedness (intended, ambivalent or unintended) between prospective and retrospective measurements of intendedness using versions of the London Measure of Unplanned Pregnancy (LMUP). Changes were assessed both continuously and categorically. Differences in the degree of change — by pregnancy outcome and participant characteristics — were examined using mixed‐effects linear and logistic regression models.
Results: Over two and one‐half years of follow‐up, 143 participants reported 174 pregnancies. Approximately half showed changes in intention between the prospective and retrospective assessments, with 38% of participants reporting increased intendedness and 10% decreased intendedness. Reported intendedness increased more among those who gave birth (mean change in continuous LMUP score, 2.2) than among those who obtained an abortion (0.7), as well as among individuals with a college degree (4.1) than among those with a high school diploma (1.2). Participants who reported recent depression or anxiety symptoms showed more stable intentions (0.02) than those who did not (2.1).
Further evidence that only children are not more narcissistic than individuals with siblings
Joshua Foster, Jennifer Raley & Joshua Isen
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are only children more narcissistic than individuals with siblings? Prior research on the topic has produced conflicting and/or inconclusive results. Dufner et al. (2019) published a recent and widely reported empirical test of this hypothesis and concluded that only children are not more narcissistic than non-only children. One of their acknowledged limitations was that their study was limited to the German population. They called for additional tests in other countries. In this paper, we report results from a high-powered test of this hypothesis using multiple measures of narcissism (i.e., two full-scale and 10 facet-level measures) and a large sample (N = 8689) of American college students. Despite this study possessing extraordinary statistical power, we likewise fail to observe any notable differences in narcissism between only children and non-only children. Follow up equivalence and Bayesian testing suggested generally strong to very strong support for the null hypothesis that only children and non-only children are equivalent in terms of narcissism.