The foster care crisis: What caused caseloads to grow

Foster care caseloads more than doubled from 1985 to 2000. This article provides the first comprehensive study of this growth by relating state-level foster care caseloads to state-specific characteristics and policies. We present evidence that increases in female incarcerations and reductions in cash welfare benefits played dominant roles in explaining the growth in foster care caseloads over this period. Our results highlight the need for child welfare policies designed specifically for the children of incarcerated parents and parents who are facing less generous welfare programs.     

Economic Incentives and Foster Child Adoption

Every year, a large number of children in the United States enter the foster care system. Many of them are eventually reunited with their biological parents or quickly adopted. A significant number, however, face long-term foster care, and some of these children are eventually adopted by their foster parents. The decision by foster parents to adopt their foster child carries significant economic consequences, including forfeiting foster care payments while also assuming responsibility for medical, legal, and educational expenses, to name a few. Since 1980, U.S. states have begun to offer adoption subsidies to offset some of these expenses, significantly lowering the cost of adopting a child who is in the foster care system. This article presents empirical evidence of the role that these economic incentives play in foster parents’ decision of when, or if, to adopt their foster child. We find that adoption subsidies increase adoptions through two distinct price mechanisms: by lowering the absolute cost of adoption, and by lowering the relative cost of adoption versus long-term foster care.     

Understanding links between adolescent health and educational attainment

The educational and economic consequences of poor health during childhood and adolescence have become increasingly clear, with a resurgence of evidence leading researchers to reconsider the potentially significant contribution of early-life health to population welfare both within and across generations. Meaningful relationships between early-life health and educational attainment raise important questions about how health may influence educational success in young adulthood and beyond, as well as for whom its influence is strongest. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, I examine how adolescents’ health and social status act together to create educational disparities in young adulthood, focusing on two questions in particular. First, does the link between adolescent health and educational attainment vary across socioeconomic and racial/ethnic groups? Second, what academic factors explain the connection between adolescent health and educational attainment? The findings suggest that poorer health in adolescence is strongly negatively related to educational attainment, net of both observed confounders and unobserved, time-invariant characteristics within households. The reduction in attainment is particularly large for non-Hispanic white adolescents, suggesting that the negative educational consequences of poor health are not limited to only the most socially disadvantaged adolescents. Finally, I find that the link between adolescent health and educational attainment is explained by academic factors related to educational participation and, most importantly, academic performance, rather than by reduced educational expectations. These findings add complexity to our understanding of how the educational consequences of poor health apply across the social hierarchy, as well as why poor health may lead adolescents to complete less schooling.In a presidential address to the Population Association of America, Palloni (2006) emphasized the need for research on early-life health as a mechanism in the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status. Although poor health is well known as a consequence of childhood and family socioeconomic conditions, it is also clear that illness during childhood and adolescence has lasting educational and socioeconomic effects (Case, Fertig, and Paxson 2005; Conley and Bennett 2000; Smith 2005). What remains less clear is how health early in life influences educational success in young adulthood and beyond. Do those with a health disadvantage graduate from high school at lower rates, for example, because they perform poorly in school or because they and their families develop reduced expectations for the future? In addition, how do race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status complicate these relationships? Our understanding of how health’s influence on educational attainment differs across groups is unclear.This article considers these complexities by asking several questions. It confirms that health during adolescence is strongly negatively associated with educational attainment and then examines this relationship in greater depth than is typical. First, I examine variation in the link between health and educational attainment along socioeconomic and racial/ethnic lines. Are the families of adolescents in poorer health better able to mitigate the negative educational consequences of a condition if they are socially and/or economically advantaged? Or do youths in these families suffer an equal or greater disadvantage? Second, I evaluate the role of academic factors—specifically, educational participation, performance, and expectations—that may explain the connection between adolescents’ health and educational attainment. I examine these questions with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), with an overall goal of understanding the ways in which health and social status act together to create educational disparities in the early life course.     

The Interplay between Educational Achievement, Occupational Success, and Well-Being

Many studies have examined the effect of life events, education, and income on well-being. Conversely, research concerning well-being as a predictor of life course outcomes is sparse. Diener’s suggestion “to inquire about the effects of well-being on future behavior and success” has, with some exceptions, not yet come to fruition. This article contributes to this body of research. We conceptualize and analyze the interplay between educational achievement, occupational success, and well-being as a complex process. The relationship between these domains is examined drawing on a structure-agency framework derived from Bourdieu and Social Comparison Theory. Social comparison between adolescents and their parents is suggested to be the mechanism explaining the effects of successful and unsuccessful intergenerational transmission of educational achievement and occupational success on well-being. It is further argued that well-being may serve as an individual resource by fostering educational and occupational outcomes. Panel data from the Transition from Education to Employment (TREE) project, a Swiss PISA 2000 follow-up study, was used. The interplay between well-being and successful and unsuccessful intergenerational transfer of educational attainment was analyzed in an autoregressive cross-lagged mixture model framework. Social comparison was found to be related to well-being, while well-being proved to significantly increase the probability of successful intergenerational transfer of educational attainment.     

The Impact of Family Transitions on Child Fostering in Rural Malawi

Despite the frequency of divorce and remarriage across much of sub-Saharan Africa, little is known about what these events mean for the living arrangements of children. We use longitudinal data from rural Malawi to examine the effects of family transitions on the prevalence and incidence of child fostering, or children residing apart from their living parents. We find that between 7 % and 15 % of children aged 3–14 are out-fostered over the two-year intersurvey period. Although divorce appears to be a significant driver of child fostering in the cross-sectional analysis, it is not significantly associated with the incidence of out-fostering. In contrast, maternal remarriage has both a lagged and an immediate effect on the incidence of out-fostering. Furthermore, the likelihood of out-fostering is even higher among children whose mother remarried and had a new child during the intersurvey period. Using longitudinal data collected from living mothers rather than from children’s current foster homes offers new insights into the reasons children are sent to live with others besides their parents.     

America's children: mixed prospects

The prospects of US children are uneven and uncertain. Today's youngsters are more apt to have fewer siblings, come from a broken home, have a working mother, and pass time as a "latchkey kid." More children are in child care than in the past and there has been a significant move toward center-based care. Increasingly, preschool-age children, particularly from relatively well-off families, are enrolled in prekindergarten educational settings. Declining family size and recent American prosperity have created material well-being for most of today's children. But the development of an underclass has also increased the number of children trapped in poverty. The stagnant wages of the "working poor" and the growing number of mother-only households have exacerbated income inequality among children from different family circumstances. The decline in educational achievement scores, which characterized the 1970s, has, for the moment at least, ended and the average school performance even improved slightly in the 1980s. In addition, more students, especially black students, completed high school in the 1980s. And the physical health of the average American child has improved dramatically since 1960. Most American children lead happy, healthy lives and several trends portend well for the future of most youngsters. But the picture is marred by the problematic future of the children of the underclass and the uncertain psychological impact of America's transformed family life.     

The magnitude of educational disadvantage of indigenous minority groups in Australia

Indigenous groups are amongst the most disadvantaged minority groups in the developed world. This paper examines the educational disadvantage of indigenous Australians by assessing academic performance at a relatively early age. We find that, by the age of 10, indigenous Australians are substantially behind non-indigenous Australians in academic achievement. Their relative performance deteriorates further over the next 2 years. School and locality do not appear to be important determinants of the indigenous to non-indigenous achievement gap. However, geographic remoteness, indigenous ethnicity and language use at home have a marked influence on educational achievement. A current focus of Australian indigenous policy is to increase school resources. Our results suggest that this will not eliminate indigenous educational disadvantage on its own.

Living with parents and educational outcomes in developing countries: empirical evidence from PISA Thailand

Family is a fundamental determinant of children’s welfare outcomes, not only in terms of good or bad behaviour, but also in terms of child development, comprising emotional, social, and cognitive skills. Family structure is even more important in a developing country in which educational achievement tends to lag. Using a national sampling from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted in 2009 and 2012 in Thailand as a case study for a developing country, this paper quantifies impacts the effects of family structure on cognitive skills and learning performance among Thai students. The findings reveal that family structure, especially for those living with both father and mother, can positively affect the academic achievement of Thai students compared to those who do not live with both parents. Thus, strengthening family structures should be another necessary policy to could promote positive educational outcomes in this developing country.     

Welfare participation and welfare dependence among the unemployed

We regard individual unemployment duration as an important determinant of individuals welfare dependence. Welfare receipt is modelled for a unique data set of 4,655 Finnish unemployed individuals. A two-stage binomial hurdle model is applied, and estimations are made by both ML and GMM. Disregarding the full interrelation between unemployment and welfare clearly underestimates the importance of the former. Unemployment has a clear impact on both the probability of welfare participation and on welfare dependence among recipients. Using a finite mixture model we find that there is a small minority of unemployed welfare recipients who are locked-in in welfare dependence.All correspondence to Maria Melkersson. We thank participants at the ESPE 2001 conference, João Santos Silva and two anonymous referees for valuable comments. Financial support from Rektor för Åbo Akademi is gratefully acknowledged (Saarela). Responsible editor: Junsen Zhang.     

Re-linking fertility behaviour and old age economic security: A delayed note on demeny

Recently Paul Demeny proposed a policy to solve the problem of below-replacement fertility. His proposal is to link the old age economic security of parents to their fertility behaviour, strengthening the material position of those aged persons who have carried the financial burden of childraising by assigning some proportion of the social security contributions of children directly to their parents. I argue that in the course of constructing his proposal, Demeny undermines the fertility-facilitating effect of conventional welfare policies and ignores the class-specific effects of existing pronatalist policies. I suggest that the adoption of additional welfare policies, apart from strengthening and correcting existing measures, would not only foster the achievement and maintenance of a socially adequate fertility level but also foster social justice for the individuals more directly involved in generational reproduction.     

农村妇女对子女的效用预期与其男孩偏好的关系

文章利用中国人民大学2010年相关调查数据从经济、照料和文化三个方面分析了我国农村地区妇女对孩子未来效用的总体预期和分性别预期,以及这种预期效用的性别差异与人们的强性别偏好之间的关系,并得出以下结论:随着经济社会的发展和人口流动的频繁,人们目前对子代的养老效用预期在经济和居住方面已经很低,但在生病照料和赡养、传宗接代方面期望依然很高;人们对男孩和女孩的预期各有侧重,依然体现了传统的"男主外,女主内"的性别认知;人们对孩子效用预期的性别差异与人们的性别偏好呈显著正相关,尤其体现在老年照料、赡养责任和传宗接代等方面,代际经济支持已经不再是影响人们男孩偏好的重要原因。     

Effects of Parents' Migration on the Education of Children Left Behind in Rural China

This essay draws on an original cross‐sectional survey of 1,010 children and their guardians in highly migratory regions of Anhui and Jiangxi provinces located in China's interior. It uses propensity score matching, a technique that mitigates endogenity, to examine the impact of parental migration and post‐migration guardianship arrangements on the children's educational performance as measured by test scores for Chinese and mathematics. One core finding is that the educational performance of children is adversely affected by parental migration only when both parents migrate or when a non‐parent guardian is the principal carer. Additionally, longer durations of parental absence are associated with poorer educational performance. The migration of two parents only significantly adversely affects the educational performance of boys. There is no significant effect on the educational performance of girls. On the basis of our findings we argue that rather than support left‐behind children within the countryside, the long‐term policy response should be to remove the institutional obstacles that prevent family resettlement in the cities.     

Welfare states and social mobility: How educational and social policy may affect cross-national differences in the association between occupational origins and destinations

Cross-national differences in the association between origins and destinations correspond to differences in both welfare regime type and access to post-secondary education. Socialist and social democratic welfare regimes foster a weaker origin–destination association than liberal, corporatist, or mixed regimes do. Nations with better-educated labor forces tend to also be the nations where the association between origins and destinations is weakest. Furthermore, the social and educational policy interact so that the tendency for educational access to lower the origin–destination association is most pronounced in the liberal welfare setting where the association would otherwise be greatest. Greater access is not necessarily associated with greater equality of opportunity, and we find very weak evidence that equality of educational opportunity itself is a direct influence on equality of occupational opportunity (even though nations that have a strong origin–education association also have a strong origin–destination association).     

Welfare reform and changes in the economic well-being of children*

Since the implementation of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program in late-1996, welfare rolls have declined by more than half. This paper explores whether improvements in the economic well-being of children have accompanied this dramatic reduction in welfare participation. Further, we examine the degree to which the success or failure of welfare reform has been shared equally among families of varying educational background. We analyze data from the March Current Population Surveys (CPS) over the years 1988 through 2001. Specifically, we link data for families with children who are interviewed in adjacent years and determine whether their economic circumstances either improved or deteriorated. We use two alternative approaches to address this general issue: a variety of regression models and a difference-in-differences methodology. These approaches provide consistent answers. In a bivariate framework TANF is associated with higher incomes; but this association becomes insignificant in the presence of business cycle controls. We also determine that children who were poor at an initial time period benefit differently, depending on their parents' educational attainment level. Poor children with parents who do not have a high school degree are significantly worse off in the TANF era, relative to the era prior to welfare reform, than are poor children of more educated parents.     

Welfare reform and changes in the economic well-being of children*

Since the implementation of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program in late-1996, welfare rolls have declined by more than half. This paper explores whether improvements in the economic well-being of children have accompanied this dramatic reduction in welfare participation. Further, we examine the degree to which the success or failure of welfare reform has been shared equally among families of varying educational background. We analyze data from the March Current Population Surveys (CPS) over the years 1988 through 2001. Specifically, we link data for families with children who are interviewed in adjacent years and determine whether their economic circumstances either improved or deteriorated. We use two alternative approaches to address this general issue: a variety of regression models and a difference-in-differences methodology. These approaches provide consistent answers. In a bivariate framework TANF is associated with higher incomes; but this association becomes insignificant in the presence of business cycle controls. We also determine that children who were poor at an initial time period benefit differently, depending on their parents' educational attainment level. Poor children with parents who do not have a high school degree are significantly worse off in the TANF era, relative to the era prior to welfare reform, than are poor children of more educated parents.     

The transmission of social inequality: Examination of the linkages between family socioeconomic status in childhood and educational achievement in young adulthood

The present study examines the linkages between family socioeconomic status (SES) in childhood and educational achievement in young adulthood using data from a 25-year longitudinal study of a birth cohort of over 1000 New Zealand children. Structural equation modeling of the association between latent SES at birth and educational achievement by age 25 years showed evidence of a strong association between latent SES and later educational achievement. Much of this association was mediated via two pathways relating to child cognitive ability and family educational aspirations; family economic resources and school factors did not mediate the association. However, even when the major theoretical pathways were taken into account, a substantial component of the latent SES/educational achievement correlation remained unexplained.     

Beyond Transmission: Intergenerational Patterns of Family Formation Among Middle-Class American Families

Research about parental effects on family behavior focuses on intergenerational transmission: that is, whether children show the same family behavior as their parents. This focus potentially overemphasizes similarity and obscures heterogeneity in parental effects on family behavior. In this study, we make two contributions. First, instead of focusing on isolated focal events, we conceptualize parents’ and their children’s family formation holistically as the process of union formation and childbearing between ages 15 and 40. We then discuss mechanisms likely to shape these intergenerational patterns. Second, beyond estimating average transmission effects, we innovatively apply multichannel sequence analysis to dyadic sequence data on middle-class American families from the Longitudinal Study of Generations (LSOG; N = 461 parent-child dyads). The results show three salient intergenerational family formation patterns among this population: a strong transmission, a moderated transmission, and an intergenerational contrast pattern. We examine what determines parents’ and children’s likelihood to sort into a specific intergenerational pattern. For middle-class American families, educational upward mobility is a strong predictor of moderated intergenerational transmission, whereas close emotional bonds between parents and children foster strong intergenerational transmission. We conclude that intergenerational patterns of family formation are generated at the intersection of macro-structural change and family internal psychological dynamics.     

Immigration,Welfare Magnets and the Geography of Child Poverty in the United States

This study presents a detailed look at the immigration and internal migration dynamics of child poverty for US States based on the 1990 US census. It assesses the impact of two policy-relevant factors on the migration of poor children across States: (1) the role of high immigration levels as a potential push for native-born and longer-term resident poor children whose parents may be reacting to the economic competition or social costs in high immigration States; and (2) the role of State AFDC benefits as a potential pull for poor children who migrate with their parents to States with higher benefit levels. The results make plain that the interstate migration patterns of poverty children differ from those of nonpoverty children, especially among whites and blacks. Female-headed households show different inter-state migration patterns than those in married-couple households. However, a multivariate analysis which includes standard state-level economic attributes provides more support for an immigration push than for a welfare magnet pull in affecting the inter-state migration of poor children. The findings also show a demographic displacement of poor children occurring in high immigration States where the net out-migration of poor children is more than compensated by larger numbers of new immigrant children in poor families with different demographic attributes. Because of these migration dynamics, the demographic profile of the child poverty population will differ across States, suggesting the need for different strategies toward reducing child poverty at the State level.     

Gender Differences in Happiness and Life Satisfaction Among Adolescents in Hong Kong: Relationships and Self-Concept

This study uses survey data from adolescents (N = 1,428) in Hong Kong to test the association of gender with happiness and life satisfaction through relationship style and self-concept. While self-esteem and purpose in life are associated with higher happiness and life satisfaction, having more close friends is related to higher happiness, but not necessarily life satisfaction. On the other hand, boys with higher academic achievement are happier, but not more satisfied; the opposite holds true for girls. Our results provide a much-needed investigation of the differential effect of gender on the subjective well-being of adolescents. Contributing to the theoretical debate about the concepts of subjective well-being, we argue that happiness and life satisfaction are empirically and conceptually distinct. Life satisfaction might be characterized by more profound enjoyment and achievement in life than happiness.     

The Quality of Life in Japan

This study is part of a collaborative project examining the quality of life in Confucian societies in Asia. Our major findings suggest that, when our sixteen specific life domains are grouped into three life spheres, namely, material, post-material, and public, the Japanese people tend to be most satisfied with the post-material sphere of life and least satisfied with the public sphere of life such as the condition of environment and welfare system. In searching the direct, independent effects of demographics, lifestyles, value priorities, and domain assessments on the quality of life, none of the public life domain assessments shows a significant impact on the quality of life, while friendships and spiritual life in the post-material sphere of life are an important determinant. Equally notable is the finding that neither educational attainment nor household income contributes significantly to the experience of subjective well-being. Leading a global lifestyle also affects positively the quality of life. Finally, being married and satisfaction with marital life appear to be powerful and prevalent influence on the quality of life in Japan.