Child and Family Policy

Expanding on the findings reported in his book, Social Awakening: Adolescent Behavior as Adulthood Approaches (Russell Sage, 2001), Professor Robert Michael has begun analyzing data from the first four rounds of data collection (on poverty, adolescent dating, and sex) from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

Michael is also analyzing data from the British National Child Development Study, a longitudinal data set of a British birth cohort born in 1958. He is studying how parent and grandparent attributes and behaviors affect children’s cognitive capacity and acquired skills. A paper based on this research, “Family Influence on Children’s Verbal Ability,” was presented at the Joint Center for Poverty Research, September Research Institute, and is forthcoming in the Monographs in Parenting series published by Lawrence Erlbaum.

In “Incarcerated Mothers: The Project on Female Prisoners and Their Children,” Professor Robert
LaLonde and Research Associate Susan George explore the impact of parental incarceration on children and families and their economic struggles following release from prison. The study uses administrative data from the Illinois Department of Corrections’ entrance and exit records, as well as other social service data, on approximately 14,000 Illinois women between 1990 and 2000. The project is funded by the Open Society, Chicago Community Trust, and Russell Sage.

Assistant Professor Ariel Kalil and Assistant Professor Thomas DeLeire co-organized the 2002 September Research Institute for the Joint Center for Poverty Research. The conference, whose theme was “Family Investments in Children’s Potential: Resources and Behaviors That Promote Children’s Success,” explored new research and avenues into the nurture-nature debate in child development, focusing on the important role that parents play in the lives of their children, as well as the role that other, outside forces play in mediating parental influences. A goal of the conference was to foster cross-disciplinary communication and to strengthen and generate new ideas for a research agenda focused on family investments in children. Kalil and DeLeire are the co-editors of the forthcoming conference volume, to be published by Lawrence Erlbaum in 2004.

DeLeire and Kalil also published “Good Things Come In 3’s: Multigenerational Coresidence and Adolescent Adjustment” in Demography (volume 39, 2002). This study showed that teenagers living in unmarried families are less likely to graduate from high school or attend college, more likely to smoke or drink, and more likely to initiate sexual activity. However, not all unmarried families are alike. In particular, teenagers living with their single mother and with at least one
grandparent in a multigenerational household have developmental outcomes that are at least as good as, and often better than, outcomes of teenagers in married families. These results persisted after controlling for a wide array of economic resources, parenting behavior, and home and school characteristics.

DeLeire and Kalil’s working paper, “How Do Cohabiting Couples with Children Spend Their Money?” compares household expenditures in cohabiting-parent families with single parents and married parents, finding that cohabiting parents spend nearly twice as much on alcohol than the other families. Kalil also authored a chapter on cohabitation and child development in Just Living Together: Implications of Cohabitation for Children, Families, and Social Policy (A. Booth and A. Crouter, editors, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003).

Kalil and James Kunz (University of Maryland), in an article in Child Development (November/December 2002) entitled “Teenage Childbearing, Marital Status, and Depressive Symptoms in Later Life,” suggest that marital status, rather than age at first birth, may be more relevant for later life psychological health. The authors examined data from 990 interviews with women conducted by the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1979 to 1992 to determine the impact of pre-childbearing factors on later occurrences of depression among teenage mothers, both married and unmarried. They found that married mothers, whether adult or adolescent at the birth of their first child, were less likely to develop symptoms of depression later in life.

Finally, Kalil, with coauthor R. Jayakody (Pennsylvania State University), explores the influence of men in low-income children’s lives in “Social Fathering in Low-Income African American Families with Preschool Children” (Journal of Marriage and the Family, 2002). This research found that the presence of a male relative who filled the role of “social father” is associated with higher levels of children’s school-readiness, whereas the presence of mothers’ romantic partners who played this role is associated with lower levels of emotional maturity on the part of the child.