Trying to keep children out of trouble: Child characteristics, neighborhood quality, and within-household resource allocation

Abstract

Prior ethnographic evidence suggests that parents combat neighborhood dangers through spending time with and money on children perceived to be at risk. This paper summarizes a secondary data investigation of whether interactions between neighborhood quality and child characteristics predict patterns of intra-household resource allocation. Using a sample of N = 1879 12- and 13-year-olds from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I find that in neighborhoods with greater numbers of problems, parents spend more time and money with firstborn children and children who are particularly short or impulsive relative to how parents treat such children in lower problem neighborhoods. Comparisons of cross-sectional and sibling fixed-effect models suggest the shortness and firstborn effects are not due to unobserved family characteristics. These results lend modest support to the assertion that parents systematically try to use within-family resources to protect certain children from threats posed by neighborhoods with high levels of crime or low levels of social cohesiveness.