Raising Concerns
Socioeconomic Status, Genotype, and the Differential Effects of Parental Separation on Educational Attainment
Fabrizio Bernardi & Gaia Ghirardi
Demography, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior research has consistently documented a more pronounced negative impact of parental separation on educational attainment among children from families with high socioeconomic status (SES). This study leverages molecular data to investigate how the parental separation penalty on educational attainment varies by SES and children's genetic propensity for education. We replicate the analysis on two distinct datasets, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and the Health and Retirement Study. We use parametric (ordinary least-squares and logit) and nonparametric models (LOWESS), with college attainment and years of education as the dependent variables and the mother's education as an indicator of family SES. Our results show that the parental separation penalty clusters among high-SES students with a low genetic propensity for education. For high-SES students with nonseparated parents, the probability of college attainment and completing more years of education is largely independent of their genetic propensity for education but decreases if they have a low genetic propensity for education and their parents separate. These findings suggest that when high-SES parents separate, they experience a reduced capacity to compensate for their children's low genetic propensity for education to boost college attainment and years of education.
A benefit-cost analysis of child care subsidy expansions: The New York State case
Robert Paul Hartley et al.
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
Proposals to expand child care assistance have proliferated at the national and state levels. This paper uses a novel approach to estimate the benefits and costs of providing child care subsidies to families up to three times the federal poverty line while supplementing child care worker compensation -- a recently-enacted reform in New York State. We estimate a net present value of $12.14 billion in yearly social benefits relative to a yearly fiscal cost of $1.61 billion. We also examine the time path of benefits and costs, impacts of alternative program designs, and the sensitivity of our main findings.
Gender Asymmetry in the Fertility of Racially and Ethnically Exogamous U.S. Couples
Margaret Weden, Michael Rendall & Joey Brown
Demography, forthcoming
Abstract:
Hypotheses explaining fertility levels in unions of women and men with different racial and ethnic origins (exogamous union fertility) -- including stigma, in-between, pronatal, and assimilative fertility -- apply equally when the minority group partner is the woman or the man. As an alternative, we propose a gendered theorizing of exogamous union fertility in which the fertility preferences of either the woman's or the man's racial and ethnic group might dominate. Our analyses reveal strong support for male-predominant patterns: the couple's fertility is nearer to that in an endogamous union of the man's racial and ethnic group than to that of an endogamous union of the woman's racial and ethnic group. We conjecture that women selecting into exogamous unions to realize their own individual fertility preferences might partially explain this finding. We find no cases of female predominance, in which the couple's fertility is nearer to that in an endogamous union of the woman's racial and ethnic group than that of an endogamous union of the man's racial and ethnic group. In addition, using a simple fertility model in which both the woman's and the man's racial and ethnic groups are included as predictors, we find that only the man's coefficients are statistically and substantively significant. A critical implication of our findings is that the standard demographic practice of using the woman's racial and ethnic group will increasingly downwardly bias estimates of fertility differences by race and ethnicity in the United States as exogamy becomes increasingly common.
Does intellectual humility transmit intergenerationally? Examining relations between parent and child measures
Candace Mills, Judith Danovitch & Natalie Quintero
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
People vary drastically in their intellectual humility (i.e., their ability to recognize gaps in their knowledge). Little is known about how intellectual humility develops or why some children might demonstrate more intellectual humility than others. The present study examines the possibility of parent-to-child transmission of intellectual humility. Parents (N = 108; 88% college graduates; 56% with household income over $100,000) of children ages 7–10 completed two primary measures of intellectual humility: a self-report measure (i.e., the Comprehensive Intellectual Humility Scale; Krumrei-Mancuso & Rouse, 2016) and a behavioral measure (i.e., the Prompted Explanation Task; Mills, Danovitch, Mugambi, Sands, & Monroe, 2022), which measured how often parents referenced knowledge limits or how to handle uncertainty. Separately, children (N = 108; M = 8.2 years; 51% girls, 49% boys; 70% White; 86% non-Hispanic) completed a knowledge estimation task where they rated their ability to answer explanatory questions about animals and vehicles. Contrary to expectations, self-report and behavioral measures of intellectual humility in parents were not correlated. Moreover, parents who self-reported higher levels of intellectual humility had children who were less humble in their knowledge ratings. That said, consistent with predictions, parents who were less humble in the way they indicated knowledge gaps had children who were less humble in the way they assessed their knowledge. These findings support that there are links between parent and child intellectual humility, but the pattern may depend on how parent intellectual humility is measured. Implications for understanding the development of intellectual humility are discussed.
The Emergent Motherhood Mental Health Advantage: Did Pandemic Times Make a Difference?
Kei Nomaguchi, Melissa Milkie & Francesca Marino
Demography, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research indicates that a new pattern of motherhood well-being advantage emerged in the 2010s for U.S. women. Although scholars have argued that maternal mental health worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, whether the parenthood mental health gap changed during the pandemic is unclear. Using data from the National Health Interview Survey (N = 29,241), this study examines the parenthood gap in yearly and quarterly changes in anxiety and depression during 2019–2021 for women aged 18–59, with attention to variation by partnership status. The results show that changes in anxiety and depression prevalence were similar across parental and partnership statuses, with indications that maternal advantages expanded among women who were single. In October–December 2020, anxiety prevalence increased more for single women without minor children of their own living in the household (“nonmothers”) than for single or partnered mothers. In April–June 2021, anxiety declined among mothers, especially single mothers, but remained higher than before the pandemic among single nonmothers. Some of these group differences in anxiety changes became nonsignificant after we controlled for household economic conditions, which were better in 2021 than in 2019 for all groups, particularly single mothers. In sum, trends in motherhood mental health advantages continued throughout the pandemic.
Maternal iron deficiency causes male-to-female sex reversal in mouse embryos
Naoki Okashita et al.
Nature, forthcoming
Abstract:
Ferrous iron (Fe2+) is essential in all eukaryotic cells for various oxidoreductase reactions, including the demethylation of DNA and proteins. Histone demethylation is required for normal epigenetic regulation of the Y-chromosomal sex-determining gene Sry in developing gonads during male sex determination. Here we investigate the potential connection between iron metabolism, histone demethylation and sex determination in mammals. We found that Fe2+-producing pathways are substantially activated in mouse embryonic gonads during the sex-determining period. Chelation of iron in cultured XY gonads reduced the level of KDM3A-mediated H3K9 demethylation of Sry, mostly abolished Sry expression and caused the gonads to express ovarian markers. In vivo, conditional deletion of the gene Tfrc -- which is required for iron incorporation -- in fetal XY gonadal somatic cells, or acute pharmaceutical suppression of available iron in pregnant mice, resulted in male-to-female gonadal sex reversal in a proportion of offspring, highlighting the pivotal role of iron metabolism in male sex determination. Finally, long-term feeding of pregnant mice with a low-iron diet, when combined with a heterozygous variant of Kdm3a that by itself has no observable effect, suppressed Sry expression and caused male-to-female sex reversal in some of the progeny, revealing a connection between maternal dietary iron and fetal developmental outcomes.