Intergenerational Transmission Of Disadvantage Research Articles

Shattered Dreams: Paternal Incarceration, Youth Expectations, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Disadvantage

Shattered Dreams: Paternal Incarceration, Youth Expectations, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Disadvantage

A Qualitative Examination of Work, Families, and Schools in Low-Income Latinx Communities During Strict Immigration Enforcement.

Education policy and the role of schools are a neglected part of the welfare state. Yet schools may be important sites for understanding how policy, work, and families intersect in immigrant households. Drawing on thirty interviews from seventeen households, this article highlights the experiences of families with young children during a time of increased national hostility toward immigrants. Given that immigrant families are often excluded from more traditional forms of social insurance, findings reveal the central role of fathers both inside and outside the home. Parental involvement, defined as parents' interactions with their children's education both inside and outside the home, was structured by English-dominant schooling environments. In Phoenix, parental involvement was uniquely shaped by a punitive immigration context at father's work and in children's schools. We discuss the implications of our findings on the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage and advance policy recommendations to support foreign- and U.S.-born children's educational success.

The Wealth (Disadvantage) of Single-Parent Households

Wealth is a buffer against economic shocks and the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage. We investigate the wealth of single-parent households in six high-income countries that span a variety of institutional contexts and welfare regimes. Using household survey data, we show that single-parent households in all these countries are disadvantaged in the wealth they hold, compared to dual-parent households—more so in Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States; and less so in Italy and, especially, Spain. We tease out major differences in types of wealth holdings in single- and dual-parent households. We find that the single-parent wealth deficit is not explained by differences in age or number of children but that it is influenced by education, income, homeownership, and receipt of intergenerational transfers. We discuss the policy implications of our findings, both in terms of how single parents are treated in social protection and taxation systems and, more broadly, in the supports they require if they are to overcome barriers to accumulating wealth.

Intergenerational Transmission of Disadvantage: Negative Parental Selection, Economic Upheaval, and Smoking

Intergenerational Transmission of Disadvantage: Negative Parental Selection, Economic Upheaval, and Smoking

Intergenerational Transmission of Disadvantage: Negative Parental Selection, Economic Upheaval, and Smoking

Recessions negatively impact the health of individuals experiencing hardship. In this paper, we investigate whether there are also long-term intergenerational health effects through their effects on health behavior of children born during difficult economic times. Based on a theoretical model of parental socialization against smoking, and using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel, we assess whether children born in the years immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Germany are more likely to smoke in adulthood. Using a difference-in-difference specification with West Germans as a control group, we find that men born during this time are 40% more likely to smoke in young adulthood than men born during the years before and afterwards. The fall of the Berlin Wall led to enormous social and economic upheaval and resulted in a stark drop in incomes and fertility in East Germany. Fertility dropped least among the lower educated and younger mothers. The resulting negative parental selection, as measured by parental education and childhood family environment, explains about one fifth of the higher incidence of smoking among children. Economic upheaval alone is unlikely to explain the remainder of the difference in smoking rates since we find no effect on smoking for those born to mothers who were already pregnant when the Berlin Wall came down, that is, those who grew up in the same environment as those born right afterwards. We conclude that it is likely that the disadvantage in childhood caused by the combination of negatively selected parents coupled with the economic upheaval reduced both the amount and quality of parental socialization against smoking, leading to the increased smoking rates that we observe.

What Research Questions Should the Next Generation of Birth Cohort Studies Address? An International Delphi Study of Experts.

Birth cohort studies (BCS) have generated a wealth of invaluable basic scientific and policy-relevant information on a wide range of issues in child health and development. This study sought to explore what research questions are currently a priority for the next generation of BCS using a 3-round Delphi survey of interdisciplinary experts. Twenty-four (Round I, N=17; Round II, N=21; Round III, N=18) experts across a wide range of fields (eg, psychology, public health, and maternal/child health) agreed to participate. In Round I, the expert panel was invited to freely respond to the question, "what are the key scientific questions future birth cohort studies should address?" Content analysis of answers was used to identify 47 questions for rating on perceived importance by the panel in Round II and consensus-achieving questions were identified. Questions that did not reach consensus in Round II were posed again for expert re-rating in Round III. Twenty six of 47 questions reached consensus in Round II, with an additional 6 reaching consensus in Round III. Consensus-achieving questions rated highly on importance spanned a number of topics, including environmental effects on child development, intergenerational transmission of disadvantage, and designing BCS to inform intervention strategies. Investigating the effects of family/environmental factors and social disadvantage on a child's development should be prioritized in designing future BCS. The panel also recommended that future BCS are designed to inform intervention strategies.

Intergenerational transmission of family adversity: Examining constellations of risk factors.

This study adopts a socio-ecological approach to examine multiple factors and processes assumed to shape the intergenerational transmission of social disadvantage, including influences of social change, social causation and social selection. Moving beyond approaches focusing on cumulative risk indices, this study uses latent class analysis to examine how different socio-economic and psycho-social risk factors combine within families and to what extent and how constellations of risk are transmitted from one generation to the next. We draw on data collected for the longitudinal and national representative 1970 British Cohort Study, comprising information on more than 11,000 cohort members and their parents. We identified four distinct risk configurations among the parent generation (G1): low-risk families (57.6%), high-risk families (16.3%), high-risk single-parents (24%) and ethnic minority families (2.1%). Within their offspring (G2) we identified five distinct risk configurations: low-risk families (62%), low-risk no-children (15.1%), moderate-risk single parents (10.1%), moderate-risk large families (8.9%), high socio-economic and high psycho-social risk (4%). There is evidence of structural mobility, and the findings suggest that intergenerational transmission of disadvantage is not just a systemic tendency towards social reproduction, but also reflects processes of social change and social selection. We conclude that a socio-ecological model provides a useful framework for a more comprehensive understanding of the multiple processes involved in the transmission of inter-cohort inequality.

Logan Together: how working across sectors for our kids is the answer to everything

Logan Together is a whole-of-city child development approach based on well-established evidence-based prevention principles and using collective impact methodologies to galvanise action across sectors and the community. The operating assumption for the project is that the first eight years are foundational for life success and that the societal and public policy costs of children failing to grow into healthy, capable adults are profound. An approach that acted longitudinally across the child’s lifecourse and universally across the whole 0-8 age cohort had a chance to alter outcomes for a generation of children and through their success, society at large. While no one is a prisoner to destiny, the life trajectories of children who struggle in their early years commonly lead to difficulties and disengagement in adolescence and marginal employment, poverty and exclusion as adults. When these adults have children of their own, the cycle is repeated. Taken at a population level, this continuing dynamic is arguably the single most significant and costly public policy issue confronting developed economies. It drives demand in welfare, social services, health, policing, justice, mental health, disability, public housing, homelessness, addiction, family violence and related areas of public service provision. Moderating these trajectories and interrupting the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage has long been the goal of social policy and practice. But despite over 40 years of increasing investment we have underwhelming results to show for our efforts in terms of population-level shift in the quantum and core characteristics of disadvantage. In Logan, as elsewhere, the bulk of social purpose investments have been focused on either ameliorating the impacts of undesirable social conditions after those problems manifest – think homelessness, mental health, unemployment - or addressing the point in time needs of particular cohorts who are associated with difficult social conditions – disengaged young people, young parents. While both these kinds of investments are important, action is triggered once people arrive at difficult life circumstances and are typically focused on short-medium term remediation of those circumstances. This kind of community investment is neither designed for, nor has the capability to respond to, the enduring characteristics and complexities of social disadvantage in Australia. An alternative policy prescription that deals realistically with the nature of social disadvantage is emerging however. Coming together from diverse theoretical origins with roots in neuroscience, early childhood, human development, community organizing, social and behavioural marketing, prevention science, population health and actuarial approaches to modelling economic impacts, a developing literature illuminates a credible, if long term, path forward. Taken individually, the ideas informing Logan Together are not new. It is however the aggregation of the policy and practice themes they reference and the articulation of a credible whole-of-population-scale execution strategy which marks out the approach as unique. This presentation will overview the development and execution of the Logan Together campaign and talk to the core design principles that inform it and which may inform replication in other contexts.

Research Review: Intergenerational transmission of disadvantage: epigenetics and parents' childhoods as the first exposure.

For decades, economists and sociologists have documented intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic disadvantage, demonstrating that economic, political, and social factors contribute to 'inherited hardship'. Drawing on biological factors, the developmental origins of adult health and disease model posits that fetal exposure to maternal prenatal distress associated with socioeconomic disadvantage compromises offspring's neurodevelopment, affecting short- and long-term physical and mental health, and thereby psychosocial standing and resources. Increasing evidence suggests that mother-to-child influence occurs prenatally, in part via maternal and offspring atypical HPA axis regulation, with negative effects on the maturation of prefrontal and subcortical neural circuits in the offspring. However, even this in utero timeframe may be insufficient to understand biological aspects of the transmission of factors contributing to disadvantage across generations. We review animal studies and emerging human research indicating that parents' childhood experiences may transfer epigenetic marks that could impact the development of their offspring independently of and in interaction with their offspring's perinatal and early childhood direct exposures to stress stemming from socioeconomic disadvantage and adversity. Animal models point to epigenetic mechanisms by which traits that could contribute to disadvantage may be transmitted across generations. However, epigenetic pathways of parental childhood experiences influencing child outcomes in the next generation are only beginning to be studied in humans. With a focus on translational research, we point to design features and methodological considerations for human cohort studies to be able to test the intergenerational transmission hypothesis, and we illustrate this with existing longitudinal studies. Epigenetic intergenerational transmission, if at play in human populations, could have policy implications in terms of reducing the continuation of disadvantage across generations. Further research is needed to address this gap in the understanding of the perpetuation of compromised lives across generations.

Understanding intergenerational transmission of deprivation in Spain: Education and marital sorting

This paper contributes to the literature on intergenerational transmission of deprivation in Spain by exploring how this phenomenon is shaped by education and marital homogamy. To that aim, a set of univariate, bivariate and trivariate ordered probit models are estimated on a sample of Spanish-born individuals from the module on intergenerational transmission of disadvantages in the Spanish Survey on Living Conditions 2011. We split the sample into two age groups (30–39 and 40–49-year-olds), and find similar levels of intergenerational transmission of deprivation amongst younger cohorts despite their higher educational mobility. Education is more relevant as a channel for the transmission of disadvantages across generations in the younger subsample than in the elder one. Marital sorting has a more relevant impact on the transmission of social disadvantage in the younger group. Finally, in the elder subsample, there seems to be a more genuine (beyond the observed transmission channels) transmission of (dis-)advantage, while in the younger subsample, the observed transmission channels seem to fully explain the inheritance of the risk for material deprivation.

Intergenerational Transmission of Educational Disadvantage in the Context of the Decline of Family Size in Urban Africa

This paper investigates the potential consequences of falling fertility on the reproduction of social inequalities over time. We develop a framework to understand how the fertility decline should interfere on the intergenerational transmission of disadvantages and apply it in the context of Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso. We use data from the Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS) of Ouagadougou, which collected retrospective data over three generations (grandmothers, mothers and children). We then use structural equation modeling (SEM) to estimate the models, and finally we conduct a sensitivity analysis to assess the consistency of our results. The results confirm that family size decline has a significant leverage on the intergenerational transmission of educational disadvantages. First, family size of mothers is significantly patterned by their grandmother’s characteristics, particularly education and socioeconomic status (SES). Second, mothers with reduced family size appear to invest more in the education of their children, which should enable them to maintain their educational advantages across generations with respect to poorer and non-educated families. These results remain robust after testing alternative assumptions about SES of grandmothers. Moreover, the findings also confirm that the relationship between educational investment and family size is changing over the course of socioeconomic development. While for recent generations (mothers and children) this relationship is strongly negative, for older generations (grandmothers and mothers) it is weak, albeit positive and statistically significant. This suggests that the meaning of the quantity of children and their participation in the labor force is shifting across generations in Ouagadougou, as in most urban areas in Africa.

Is There a Case for Intergenerational Transmission of Female Labour Force Participation and Educational Attainment? Evidence from Greece During the Crisis

Using logit regressions techniques for binary response models, fit by maximum likelihood with robust standard errors, the analysis investigates the intergenerational transmission of female labour force participation and the intergenerational transmission of educational outcomes in Greece. To conduct this study, we pioneer in the utilization of a unique dataset, the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) for Greece. Data refer to 2011 when the first elements of the economic adjustment programme were being put into place. Most importantly, the EU-SILC 2011 wave is the latest one to include an ad hoc module on the intergenerational transmission of disadvantages. Results show that a wife’s labour force participation decision is related to her husband’s mother’s and mother’s participation, and even more strongly related to her own level of educational achievement along with the number of children in the household. The labour force participation of the mother of the husband is more important than that of the woman’s own mother, indicating a strong transmission of the husband’s cultural model. Concerning educational attainment, parental educational background, and especially maternal, is identified as a key determinant of women’s high level of educational achievement.

Book Reviews

Javier Cano-Urbina of Florida State University reviews “Coming of Age in the Other America,” by Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Examines how social policy can interrupt the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage and overcome the social origins of disadvantaged youth. Focuses on a sample of young people between fifteen and twenty-four in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2010, in order to consider how young people from deeply disadvantaged origins navigate the transition to adulthood.”

Intergenerational Transmission of Disadvantage: Policy Implications

Intergenerational Transmission of Disadvantage: Policy Implications