A Structural Model for the Developmental Status of Young Children

Abstract

All children born into advantaged families do not enjoy advantaged circumstances as adults. Similarly, all children born into disadvantaged circumstances do not remain forever disadvantaged. The intergenerational transmission of advantage and disadvantage is not automatic. Nevertheless, there is a general tendency for advantage and disadvantage to be reproduced intergenerationally. This tendency constitutes a fundamental problem addressed by social stratification theory and one that identifies family processes as critical in the intergenerational transmission of inequality. The fact that social inequalities are reproduced across generations is uncontested, but how this process occurs is intensely debated. One body of scholarship stresses the advantages that privileged parents can provide to their children. Such parents can structure enriching experiences for children, facilitate their academic and occupational achievement, and generally position children to succeed. Another body of scholarship stresses the human cost of economic hardship. This work focuses on the deleterious consequences of poverty for family dynamics and for children's physical, social, and psychological development. The literatures on privilege and poverty are poorly integrated. Consequently, how the socioeconomic status of parents and the developmental status of children interact is not clearly understood. Nevertheless, available scholarship does suggest that processes responsible for the intergenerational transmission of inequality are complex, operating at several levels of analysis and interacting in a synergistic fashion. This study uses structural equation modeling to explore the determinants of the developmental status of young children. This technique is particularly appropriate for evaluating hypotheses that derive from well-developed bodies of substantive and theoretical research (Lavee, 1988). Children aged birth to 4 years from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) are analyzed. The literature reviewed suggests that characteristics of mother, household, and child collectively influence the quality of the home environment, which mediates the influence of demographic and socioeconomic variables on child outcomes. The present research assesses this model, focusing on the overall goodness-of-fit between theoretically-derived expectations and empirical results. Analysis is conducted on a model-fitting sample and replicated on a model-testing sample. The adequacy of fit is also assessed for specific subgroups. INFLUENCES ON CHILDREN'S DEVELOPMENTAL STATUS ORIENTING PRINCIPLES Scholarship inspired by diverse theoretical perspectives and disciplinary traditions can initially be integrated only under a broad and relatively nonsectarian framework. This literature review adopts a generalized ecological perspective (Bronfenbrenner, 1986) because it can subsume most reported research without altering authors' original intent. An ecological perspective has little to say about the relative importance of successively more proximate contexts as determinants of outcomes, but more proximal/distal contexts are not inherently privileged. An ecological perspective is, therefore, appropriate because the objective of this study is not to assess the relative importance of specific determinants of children's development but rather to evaluate a general model of multiple influences. Available scholarship is extensive but not expansive. Most studies explore the relationship among a delimited set of variables and acknowledge that other relevant variables are excluded, frequently because small and unrepresentative samples do not permit analyses of demographic and socioeconomic differences. Most available scholarship, however, raises questions about relationships among included and excluded variables. Some of these questions are beginning to be answered by research on the NLSY data set. The pioneering work of Menaghan and Parcel (1991) and Parcel and Menaghan (1990, 1993, in press) is particularly important because it explores the home environment and child outcomes in a holistic context. …