Proud Parents
Spending on Daughters Versus Sons in Economic Recessions
Kristina Durante et al.
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although parents often try not to favor one child, we examine whether specific environmental factors might bias parents to favor children of one sex over the other. This research draws on theory in evolutionary biology suggesting that investment in female versus male offspring depends on resource availability. Applying this to consumers, a series of experiments show that poor economic conditions favor resource allocations to daughters over sons. For example, poor conditions led people to bequeath more assets to girls in their will, and to choose girls to receive a U.S. Treasury bond and a beneficial extracurricular activity. It is proposed that this happens because spending on children represents a reproductive investment, and that boys' and girls' relative reproductive value varies with economic conditions. Supporting this account, perceptions of which child will have more children statistically mediates the effect of economic conditions on preferences for girls. Consequently, the effect is strengthened as a child approaches reproductive age, and is moderated by individual differences (risk aversion and monogamy) directly related to our theoretical model. This research contributes to the consumer behavior literature by revealing how, why, and when environmental factors influence spending on girls versus boys.
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Effect of Joint Custody Laws on Children's Future Labor Market Outcomes
Abhradeep Maiti
International Review of Law and Economics, August 2015, Pages 22-31
Abstract:
In a joint custody regime, both parents are given equal preference by the court while granting the custodial rights of their children in the event of divorce. Using 50 years of census data for the United States' population, I show that growing up in a joint custody regime leads to lower educational attainment and worse labor market outcomes. My results are robust to different model specifications and apply to both males and females.
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Family Structure Instability, Genetic Sensitivity, and Child Well-Being
Colter Mitchell et al.
American Journal of Sociology, January 2015, Pages 1195-1225
Abstract:
The association between family structure instability and children's life chances is well documented, with children reared in stable, two-parent families experiencing more favorable outcomes than children in other family arrangements. This study examines father household entrances and exits, distinguishing between the entrance of a biological father and a social father and testing for interactions between family structure instability and children's age, gender, and genetic characteristics. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and focusing on changes in family structure by age (years 0-9), the authors show that father exits are associated with increases in children's antisocial behavior, a strong predictor of health and well-being in adulthood. The pattern for father entrances is more complicated, with entrances for the biological father being associated with lower antisocial behavior among boys and social father entrances being associated with higher antisocial behavior. Child's age does not moderate the association; however, genetic information in the models sharpens the findings substantially.
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Behavioral Resemblance and Paternal Investment: Which Features of the Chip off the Old Block Count?
Gordon Gallup et al.
Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
The high cost of being cuckolded has been a source of a strong selective pressure on reproductive competition among human males. Although evidence for preferential investment in offspring based on paternal resemblance is well established, men may have undergone selective pressure to take into account behavioral resemblance as well. We tested this hypothesis using 277 undergraduate university students who responded to an anonymous survey about how they were treated by their father and their physical and behavioral resemblance to him. We replicated the effect of physical resemblance on paternal investment, and found that behavioral resemblance accounted for even more variance in paternal investment than physical resemblance. Furthermore, mediation analyses revealed that both physical resemblance and behavioral resemblance acted primarily by improving relationship quality between the child and the father. These findings are considered in relation to an attempt to develop more detailed analytical categories of paternity assurance tactics (Gallup & Burch, 2006).
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Residential Mobility During Adolescence: Do Even "Upward" Moves Predict Dropout Risk?
Molly Metzger et al.
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper uses the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to investigate the impact of housing instability in adolescence on the likelihood of subsequent graduation from high school. Combining census data, self-reports, and information about respondents' residential changes, we use the variation in the number of moves and neighborhood quality to predict whether participants obtain a high school diploma. Controlling for major predictors of housing mobility, students experiencing at least one move over a 12-month period have a roughly 50% decreased likelihood of obtaining a high school diploma by the age of 25. These associations are identified regardless of whether students move to a poorer or less-poor neighborhood. Our results carry implications for the development of housing policies and interventions designed for disadvantaged populations.
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Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies
Tinca Polderman et al.
Nature Genetics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite a century of research on complex traits in humans, the relative importance and specific nature of the influences of genes and environment on human traits remain controversial. We report a meta-analysis of twin correlations and reported variance components for 17,804 traits from 2,748 publications including 14,558,903 partly dependent twin pairs, virtually all published twin studies of complex traits. Estimates of heritability cluster strongly within functional domains, and across all traits the reported heritability is 49%. For a majority (69%) of traits, the observed twin correlations are consistent with a simple and parsimonious model where twin resemblance is solely due to additive genetic variation. The data are inconsistent with substantial influences from shared environment or non-additive genetic variation. This study provides the most comprehensive analysis of the causes of individual differences in human traits thus far and will guide future gene-mapping efforts. All the results can be visualized using the MaTCH webtool.
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Parental Separation, Parental Alcoholism, and Timing of First Sexual Intercourse
Mary Waldron et al.
Journal of Adolescent Health, May 2015, Pages 550-556
Purpose: We examined timing of first voluntary sexual intercourse as a joint function of parental separation during childhood and parental history of alcoholism.
Methods: Data were drawn from a birth cohort of female like-sex twins (n = 569 African ancestry [AA]; n = 3,415 European or other ancestry [EA]). Cox proportional hazards regression was conducted predicting age at first sex from dummy variables coding for parental separation and parental alcoholism. Propensity score analysis was also employed to compare intact and separated families, stratified by predicted probability of separation.
Results: Earlier sex was reported by EA twins from separated and alcoholic families, compared to EA twins from intact nonalcoholic families, with effects most pronounced through the age of 14 years. Among AA twins, effects of parental separation and parental alcoholism were largely nonsignificant. Results of propensity score analyses confirmed unique risks from parental separation in EA families, where consistent effects of parental separation were observed across predicted probability of separation. For AA families, there was poor matching on risk factors presumed to predate separation, which limited interpretability of survival-analytic findings.
Conclusions: In European American families, parental separation during childhood is an important predictor of early-onset sex, beyond parental alcoholism and other correlated risk factors. To characterize risk for African Americans associated with parental separation, additional research is needed where matching on confounders can be achieved.
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Increases in Maternal Education and Low-Income Children's Cognitive and Behavioral Outcomes
Jessica Harding
Developmental Psychology, May 2015, Pages 583-599
Abstract:
Although the strong link between maternal education and children's outcomes is one of the most well-established findings in developmental psychology (Reardon, 2011; Sirin, 2005), less is known about how young, low-income children are influenced by their mothers completing additional education. In this research, longitudinal data from the Head Start Impact Study were used to explore the associations between increases in maternal education and Head Start eligible children's cognitive skills and behavioral problems in 1st grade. Propensity score weighting was used to identify a balanced comparison group of 1,362 children whose mothers did not increase their education between baseline (when children were aged 3 or 4) and children's kindergarten year, who are similar on numerous covariates to the 262 children whose mothers did increase their education. Propensity-score weighted regression analyses indicated that increases in maternal education were positively associated with children's standardized cognitive scores, but also with higher teacher-reported externalizing behavioral problems in 1st grade. The increases in externalizing behavioral problems were larger for children whose mothers had less than a college degree at baseline.
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Childhood social inequalities influences neural processes in young adult caregiving
Pilyoung Kim et al.
Developmental Psychobiology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Childhood poverty is associated with harsh parenting with a risk of transmission to the next generation. This prospective study examined the relations between childhood poverty and non-parent adults' neural responses to infant cry sounds. While no main effects of poverty were revealed in contrasts of infant cry versus acoustically matched white noise, a gender by childhood poverty interaction emerged. In females, childhood poverty was associated with increased neural activations in the posterior insula, striatum, calcarine sulcus, hippocampus, and fusiform gyrus, while, in males, childhood poverty was associated with reduced levels of neural responses to infant cry in the same regions. Irrespective of gender, neural activation in these regions was associated with higher levels of annoyance with the cry sound and reduced desire to approach the crying infant. The findings suggest gender differences in neural and emotional responses to infant cry sounds among young adults growing up in poverty.
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Birth Order and Mortality: A Population-Based Cohort Study
Kieron Barclay & Martin Kolk
Demography, April 2015, Pages 613-639
Abstract:
This study uses Swedish population register data to investigate the relationship between birth order and mortality at ages 30 to 69 for Swedish cohorts born between 1938 and 1960, using a within-family comparison. The main analyses are conducted with discrete-time survival analysis using a within-family comparison, and the estimates are adjusted for age, mother's age at the time of birth, and cohort. Focusing on sibships ranging in size from two to six, we find that mortality risk in adulthood increases with later birth order. The results show that the relative effect of birth order is greater among women than among men. This pattern is consistent for all the major causes of death but is particularly pronounced for mortality attributable to cancers of the respiratory system and to external causes. Further analyses in which we adjust for adult socioeconomic status and adult educational attainment suggest that social pathways only mediate the relationship between birth order and mortality risk in adulthood to a limited degree.
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Maternal Education and the Link Between Birth Timing and Children's School Readiness
Jennifer March Augustine et al.
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: This study explored whether mothers' education magnified any benefits that waiting until older ages to have children might have for their children's educational careers.
Methods: Multiple-group path modeling assessed whether and why the positive association between mothers' age at first birth and children's test scores was greater for children of college-educated women than children of other women.
Results: Older age at first birth was associated with higher math and reading test scores among the children of college-educated women via their mothers' higher income and cognitive support for children. These mediational paths were less pronounced among the children of high-school-educated women and were not observed among the children of high school dropouts.
Conclusion: Any potential effects of women's delayed fertility on their children's early educational experiences appeared to be confined to the most educated women.
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Mothers' Employment and Children's Educational Gender Gap
Xiaodong Fan, Hanming Fang & Simen Markussen
NBER Working Paper, May 2015
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the connection between two concurrent trends since 1950: the narrowing and reversal of the educational gender gap and the increased labor force participation rate (LFPR) of married women. We hypothesize that the education production for boys is more adversely affected by a decrease in the mother's time input as a result of increasing employment. Therefore, an increase in the labor force participation rate of married women may narrow and even reverse the educational gender gap in the following generation. We use micro data from the Norwegian registry to directly show that the mother's employment during her children's childhood has an asymmetric effect on the educational achievement of her own sons and daughters. We also document a positive correlation between the educational gender gap in a particular generation and the LFPR of married women in the previous generation at the U.S. state level. We then propose a model that generates a novel prediction about the implications of these asymmetric effects on the mothers' labor supply decisions and find supporting evidence in both the U.S. and Norwegian data.
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The Effects of Paid Maternity Leave: Evidence from Temporary Disability Insurance
Jenna Stearns
Journal of Health Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper investigates the effects of a large-scale paid maternity leave program on birth outcomes in the United States. In 1978, states with Temporary Disability Insurance (TDI) programs were required to start providing wage replacement benefits to pregnant women, substantially increasing access to antenatal and postnatal paid leave for working mothers. Using natality data, I find that TDI paid maternity leave reduces the share of low birth weight births by 3.2 percent, and the estimated treatment-on-the-treated effect is over 10 percent. It also decreases the likelihood of early term birth by 6.6 percent. Paid maternity leave has particularly large impacts on the children of unmarried and black mothers.
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Estrangement Between Mothers and Adult Children: The Role of Norms and Values
Megan Gilligan, Jill Suitor & Karl Pillemer
Journal of Marriage and Family, forthcoming
Abstract:
Relationships between mothers and their children are expected to be lifelong and rewarding for both members of the dyad. Because of the salience of these ties, they are likely to be disrupted only under conditions of extreme relational tension and dissatisfaction. In this work, the authors drew on theoretical arguments regarding societal norm violations and value similarity to examine the processes that lead to estrangement between mothers and adult children. To address this issue, they used quantitative and qualitative data on 2,013 mother-adult child dyads nested within 561 later life families, including 64 in which mothers reported being estranged from at least 1 of their children. Value dissimilarity was found to be a strong predictor of estrangement, whereas violation of serious societal norms was not. Qualitative data revealed that value dissimilarity created severe relational tension between mothers and adult children leading to estrangement.
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Katie McLaughlin et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 5 May 2015, Pages 5637-5642
Abstract:
Disruptions in stress response system functioning are thought to be a central mechanism by which exposure to adverse early-life environments influences human development. Although early-life adversity results in hyperreactivity of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis in rodents, evidence from human studies is inconsistent. We present results from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project examining whether randomized placement into a family caregiving environment alters development of the autonomic nervous system and HPA axis in children exposed to early-life deprivation associated with institutional rearing. Electrocardiogram, impedance cardiograph, and neuroendocrine data were collected during laboratory-based challenge tasks from children (mean age = 12.9 y) raised in deprived institutional settings in Romania randomized to a high-quality foster care intervention (n = 48) or to remain in care as usual (n = 43) and a sample of typically developing Romanian children (n = 47). Children who remained in institutional care exhibited significantly blunted SNS and HPA axis responses to psychosocial stress compared with children randomized to foster care, whose stress responses approximated those of typically developing children. Intervention effects were evident for cortisol and parasympathetic nervous system reactivity only among children placed in foster care before age 24 and 18 months, respectively, providing experimental evidence of a sensitive period in humans during which the environment is particularly likely to alter stress response system development. We provide evidence for a causal link between the early caregiving environment and stress response system reactivity in humans with effects that differ markedly from those observed in rodent models.
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Parents' Beliefs Regarding Sex Education for Their Children in Southern Alabama Public Schools
Vaughn Millner, Madhuri Mulekar & Julio Turrens
Sexuality Research and Social Policy, June 2015, Pages 101-109
Abstract:
This study investigated the attitudes of parents of public school children in a conservative southern U.S. metropolitan area concerning the incorporation of a variety of adolescent pregnancy prevention strategies taught in the public school curriculum. It also assessed how attitudes from parents living in high risk teen pregnancy zip codes compared to the attitudes from parents living in the larger community. A telephone survey included 402 randomly selected parents from Mobile County, Alabama and an additional 120 Mobile County parents who lived in specific regions with high rates of teen pregnancy (target group). When the participants from the entire group were asked if schools should teach sex education, almost 80 % responded affirmatively and 16.5 % responded negatively. There were statistically significant income, education, and race differences between the at-large and target groups and statistically significant differences in parents' attitudes about whether or not their children should be taught about abstinence and other methods for preventing adolescent pregnancy in public schools. More than three-fourths of both groups, however, supported an assortment of adolescent pregnancy prevention strategies, a finding that could belie statistical difference in opinions between the two groups. The results suggest there is strong parental support for an approach to sex education in Alabama public schools that extends beyond abstinence-only. Informing state public policy-makers of these research findings could result in a sustained investment in the implementation of evidence-based adolescent sex education programs appropriate for the adolescents served.
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Ryan Haley & Laurie Miller
Empirical Economics, June 2015, Pages 1395-1418
Abstract:
Using the 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce, we study how two forms of flextime correlate with family stress, workplace stress, and sleep difficulties. The first flextime measure is the ability to easily take time off for personal and family matters, which correlates with a statistically and economically significant reduction in workplace stress. Subsequently, we find that this same flexibility is associated with 6-10 % reduction in the likelihood of self-reported sleep difficulties for the full sample, and as high as an 11-25 % reduction in a subgroup analysis concerning unmarried females with children. The second flextime measure is the option of a compressed workweek, which also correlates with a statistically reduction in workplace stress, though the estimate is considerably smaller than for the first flexibility; a subsequent analysis finds no statistically significant relationship between this flexibility and sleep difficulties. Our findings suggest that the more flexible flexibility (i.e., more short-notice schedule flexibility) appears to be associated with larger reductions in the probability of being stressed, enough, in fact, to carry through to noticeable improvements in concomitant sleep difficulties. Thus, the first form of flextime may function, based on this observational analysis, as a tangible non-medical way to meet worker flextime desires and firm aspirations for increased safety and less absenteeism, all while potentially offering a positive public health externality. The size and significance of the flextime results prevail through bias assessments and sensitivity analyses.
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Katherine Pears et al.
Child Development, forthcoming
Abstract:
Few prospective studies have examined school mobility in children in foster care. This study described the school moves of 86 such children and 55 community comparison children (primarily Caucasian), living in a medium-sized metropolitan area in the Pacific Northwest who were approximately 3 to 6 years old at the study start. Additionally, the effects of moves from kindergarten through Grade 2 on academic and socioemotional competence in Grades 3 through 5 were examined. A greater number of early school moves was associated with poorer later socoemotional competence and partially mediated the effects of maltreatment and out-of-home placement on socioemotional competence. This was the case only for children with poorer early learning skills in kindergarten. Implications for preventive intervention are discussed.