Poverty History, Marital History, and Quality of Children's Home Environments

Abstract

Analyses of the consequences of poverty often treat poor children as a single, homogeneous group. We study relations among depth or timing of poverty, mother's marital history, and quality of the home environment for children aged 6-9, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. HOME scores increased markedly with income up to three times the poverty line, particularly for cognitive stimulation. The benefits of having a married mother were larger among children who were not poor than among poor children, particularly for emotional support. Recent poverty was associated with deficits nearly as largely as long-term poverty. However, poverty early in life had no effect on HOME scores at assessment. Key Words: children, cognitive development, family structure, home environment, poverty. Many studies have documented the health and developmental disadvantages experienced by poor children in the United States (Carnegie Task Force, 1994; Duncan & Brooks-Gunn, 1997; Klerman, 1991; Sherman, 1994). For example, developmental outcomes such as children's aptitude test scores (Baker & Mott, 1992; Korenman, Miller, & Sjaastad, 1995; Luster & Dubow, 1992; Smith, Brooks-Gunn, & Klebanov, 1997), elementary school performance (e.g., Bradley & Caldwell, 1984; Bradley, Caldwell, & Rock, 1988), and socioemotional development (Baker & Mott, 1992) are all notably lower among poor children than among children who are not poor. Aspects of the child's home environment, such as parenting practices and the availability of learning resources, are highly correlated with both poverty status (Baker & Mott, 1992; Garrett, Ng'andu, & Ferron, 1994) and developmental outcomes (Korenman et al., 1995; Miller, 1996; Smith et al., 1997). Hence the quality of the child's home environment may act as an important mediating factor between poverty and measures of child wellbeing. In addition, there are large differences in the extent of poverty according to mother's marital history (Hogan & Lichter, 1995; McLanahan & Casper, 1995; Miller, 1996). Several studies have shown that the mother's marital status is also an important determinant of the quality of the home environment (MacKinnon, Brody, & Stoneman, 1982; Menaghan & Parcel, 1995). Children whose mothers are divorced or have never been married are worse off than those whose mothers are married. Because marital history affects both the risk of poverty and the quality of children's home environments, it is important to disentangle the respective contributions of poverty and marital history to the quality of children's home environments in order to design appropriate interventions to improve the well-being of children. The consequences of poverty for the wellbeing of American children are of considerable concern because annual child poverty rates in the early 1990s were as high as 25% (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1993). Between 40% and 50% of American children born in recent years are expected to be poor at some point before reaching adulthood (Ashworth, Hill, & Walker, 1994; Miller, 1996). Children whose mothers remain married throughout their early childhood have a lower risk of experiencing poverty than do children with other types of family histories. According to estimates from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), only one third of the children whose mothers were married both at the time of the child's birth and when the child was in early elementary school were poor at some time during childhood, compared with more than 90% of children with never-married mothers and 80% of children whose mothers became divorced during that interval (Miller, 1996). The high poverty rates for children of never-married mothers are a consequence of both relatively low rates of laborforce participation and lower average wages due to lower rates of school completion among these mothers (McLanahan & Casper, 1995). …