Starting and stopping families
The Causal Impact of Removing Children from Abusive and Neglectful Homes
Anthony Bald et al.
NBER Working Paper, January 2019
Abstract:
This paper uses administrative data to measure causal impacts of removing children from families investigated for abuse or neglect. We use the removal tendency of quasi-experimentally assigned child protective service investigators as an instrument for whether authorities removed and placed children into foster care. Our main analysis estimates impacts on educational outcomes by gender and age at the time of an investigation. We find that removal significantly increases standardized test scores for young girls. There are no detectable impacts on the test scores of girls removed at older ages or boys of any age. For older children, we also find few significant impacts of removal on the likelihood of having a juvenile conviction, graduating from high school, enrolling in a postsecondary institution, or having a teenage birth. We investigate potential mechanisms driving heterogeneous impacts by gender and age. Our results do not appear to be driven by heterogeneous effects on foster care placement, school mobility and quality, or participation in special education programs. For girls, we find that removal significantly increases the likelihood of post-investigation criminal charges or incarceration for parents and caretakers who are the perpetrators of abuse or neglect.
Intergenerational continuity and stability in early family formation
Jennifer Lansford et al.
Journal of Family Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines intergenerational continuity (mean level similarity) and stability (maintenance of rank ordering of individuals) in age and marital status at the time of becoming a young parent using prospective data from 3 generations of 585 families. G2 participants were recruited at the age of 5 years and followed until the age of 28, by which time 227 had become parents themselves. The findings suggest that despite dramatic intergenerational discontinuities with young adults, on average, now being more likely to be unmarried and older at the time of becoming parents than in previous generations, intergenerational stability in age and marital status at the time of becoming a young parent is still substantial. This intergenerational stability was, for the most part, not moderated by demographic, familial, or behavioral factors, suggesting that a developmental, multigenerational perspective is necessary to understand what has previously been considered a largely demographic issue.
Testing the Kundera Hypothesis: Does Every Woman (But Not Every Man) Prefer Her Child to Her Mate?
Carlos Hernández Blasi & Laura Mondéjar
Evolutionary Psychology, October 2018
Abstract:
The context of a famous novel by Milan Kundera (Immortality) suggests that when faced with a life-or-death situation, every woman would prefer to save her child than her husband, left hanging whether every man would do the same. We labeled this as the Kundera hypothesis, and the purpose of this study was to test it empirically as we believe it raises a thought-provoking question in evolutionary terms. Specifically, 197 college students (92 women) were presented a questionnaire where they had to make different decisions about four dilemmas about who to save (their mate or their offspring) in two hypothetical life-or-death situations: a home fire and a car crash. These dilemmas involved two different mate ages (a 25- or a 40-year-old mate) and two offspring ages (1- or a 6-year-old child). For comparative purposes, we also included complementary life-or-death dilemmas on both a sibling and an offspring, and a sibling and a cousin. The results generally supported the Kundera hypothesis: Although the majority of men and women made the decision to save their offspring instead of their mate, about 18% of men on average (unlike the 5% of women) consistently decided to save their mate across the four dilemmas in the two life-or-death situations. These data were interpreted with reference to Hamilton’s inclusive fitness theory, the preferential role of women as kin keepers, and the evolution of altruism toward friends and mates.
Evolution, motivation, and the mating/parenting trade–off
Alec Beall & Mark Schaller
Self and Identity, January/February 2019, Pages 39-59
Abstract:
An evolutionary perspective on motivation implies an inverse relation between two motivational systems – one that regulates mate acquisition and the other that regulates parental care-giving. Study 1 (N = 2252) used correlational methods to test whether an inverse relation manifests at the level of chronic individual differences. Results revealed that short-term mating orientation (STMO) was inversely associated with a nurturant disposition toward children, but was positively associated with a protective disposition toward children. Studies 2 and 3 used experimental methods to test whether the inverse relation manifests at the level of temporary cognitive accessibility. Study 2 (N = 92) revealed that women (but not men) reported lower levels of STMO following an experimental procedure designed to activate the parental care motivational system. Conversely, results from Study 3 (n = 308) suggest that both men and women reported lower levels of tender emotional responses towards infants following an experimental procedure designed to activate the mate acquisition motivational system. Together, these results provide novel evidence bearing on the psychological manifestations of a mating/parenting trade-off, while also implicating additional variables that may affect the nature of these manifestations.
Enriching home language environment among families from low-SES backgrounds: A randomized controlled trial of a home visiting curriculum
Christy Leung, Marc Hernandez & Dana Suskind
Early Childhood Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study evaluated the efficacy of the six-month 3Ts Home Visiting (3Ts-HV) curriculum, designed to empower socioeconomically disadvantaged caregivers with evidence-based knowledge and strategies in order to enrich the home language environment for their young children’s cognitive and language development. Using a matched pairs randomized controlled trial design, caregiver–child dyads were randomized into the 3Ts-HV intervention (n = 79) or Healthy Lifestyle control (n = 78) condition. Analyses of covariance revealed that compared with their control counterparts, the 3Ts-HV caregivers were more knowledgeable about early childhood cognitive and language development, and provided more language exposure for and engaged in more conversational turn-takings with their child. The 3Ts-HV caregivers also utilized more praise, explanations, and open-ended questions but less criticism, physical control, and intrusiveness than their control counterparts when interacting with their child. Findings provided empirical evidence supporting the immediate efficacy of the 3Ts-HV intervention in enhancing caregiver knowledge, the quantity of linguistic inputs, and the quality of caregiver interactions in the context of low-SES households, controlling for caregiver education level, language skills, and marital status.
Intragenomic conflict over bet-hedging
Jon Wilkins & Tanmoy Bhattacharya
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 31 December 2018
Abstract:
Genomic imprinting, where an allele’s expression pattern depends on its parental origin, is thought to result primarily from an intragenomic evolutionary conflict. Imprinted genes are widely expressed in the brain and have been linked to various phenotypes, including behaviours related to risk tolerance. In this paper, we analyse a model of evolutionary bet-hedging in a system with imprinted gene expression. Previous analyses of bet-hedging have shown that natural selection may favour alleles and traits that reduce reproductive variance, even at the expense of reducing mean reproductive success, with the trade-off between mean and variance depending on the population size. In species where the sexes have different reproductive variances, this bet-hedging trade-off differs between maternally and paternally inherited alleles. Where males have the higher reproductive variance, alleles are more strongly selected to reduce variance when paternally inherited than when maternally inherited. We connect this result to phenotypes connected with specific imprinted genes, including delay discounting and social dominance. The empirical patterns are consistent with paternally expressed imprinted genes promoting risk-averse behaviours that reduce reproductive variance. Conversely, maternally expressed imprinted genes promote risk-tolerant, variance-increasing behaviours. We indicate how future research might further test the hypotheses suggested by our analysis.