Mothers' work patterns and Children's cognitive achievement: Evidence from the India Human Development survey

As female labor force participation increases globally, the relationship between maternal employment and children's development remains unclear. Using data from the India Human Development Survey (2005), we investigate the link between maternal employment and children's arithmetic and reading achievement. We develop a work pattern typology that goes beyond standard measures of employment and captures work intensity and its compatibility with child-rearing in a transitional economy. We find that the relationship between maternal employment and children's outcomes is not unidimensional. For example, children of self-employed mothers are not disadvantaged compared to those with stay-at-home mothers, but maternal employment in salaried jobs or wage work outside the home is negatively associated with cognitive skills in children. However, this negative association is reversed at higher levels of maternal education, suggesting greater access to resources and flexibility associated with better jobs mitigate the negative aspects of maternal employment posed by time constraints. Additionally, maternal employment is associated with maternal involvement in schoolwork and financial investment in academic activities, providing evidence that both time and resources devoted to children's education are significant.     

大学生涉足“互联网金融”现象的透析及对教育工作的启示

互联网金融的核心是金融理财和网络消费。互联网金融为大学生创业开创了新天地,为培养理财意识开辟了新课堂,同时也为那些风险意识弱、热衷追潮的大学生埋下了因过于关注投资而荒废学业、因经不起网购引诱而盲目消费、因轻松获取投资回报而助长投机心理的伏笔。在后现代消费主义思潮的冲击下,如何引导大学生正确认知互联网金融带来的机遇和蕴含的风险,从互联网金融中挖掘教育资源和教育方法,需要加以深入研究。     

The ‘developmental gradient’ revisited: Australian children's time with adult caregivers from infancy to middle childhood

Children's time use patterns represent a potentially important mechanism for the transmission of disadvantage across generations. Recent international research indicates that more educated mothers tailor the content of time with children to favour activities that are particularly important at different developmental stages – a finding that has been termed the ‘developmental gradient’. Using time diary data for a sample of Australian children, this paper seeks to extend previous work in several ways. We first establish whether a ‘developmental gradient’ exists in Australian children's time with mothers, comparable to the results from international studies. We go further, however, by extending the analysis to consider time investments provided by fathers and other adult caregivers, and examining the importance of resources for explaining the patterns of time use. Consistent with theory, our results indicate that educational gaps in time spent ‘teaching’ are largest in the 4–5 age group, gaps in ‘play’ time with fathers are largest for toddlers (2–3), and gaps in ‘enrichment’ are largest for 6–7 and 8–9. Time with parents appears to be the primary driver of observed patterns of time spent ‘teaching’ and ‘playing’, while for ‘enrichment,’ differences are distributed across caregivers, but largest for non-parent caregivers. These results are not driven by differential access to resources. Our results suggest that the developmental gradient represents a plausible mechanism for the transmission of intergenerational disadvantage in Australia, and that policy responses focussed on better educating parents to understand the developmental needs of their children are likely to be an effective response.     

Family structure and the reproduction of inequality: Parents’ contribution to children’s college costs

This article examines the role of family structure in the financial support parents provide for their children’s college education. Data are from the Health and Retirement Study. We focus on aspects of family structure that affect parental support and estimate shared family variance in investments as well as within-family variation using a multilevel model. Family membership accounts for about 60% of the variance in payment of college costs. Small family size, living with both biological parents (compared to one biological parent and a stepparent), higher parental education, and having older parents are associated with greater parental expenditures.     

Family structure and the economic wellbeing of children in youth and adulthood

An extensive literature on the relationship between family structure and children’s outcomes consistently shows that living with a single parent is associated with negative outcomes. Few US studies, however, examine how a child’s family structure affects outcomes for the child once he/she reaches adulthood. We directly examine, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, whether family structure during childhood is related to the child’s economic wellbeing both during childhood as well as during adulthood. We find that living with a single parent is associated with the level of family resources available during childhood. This finding persists even when we remove time invariant factors within families. We also show that family structure is related to the child’s education, marital status, and adult family income. Once we control for the child’s demography and economic wellbeing in childhood, however, the associations into adulthood become trivial in size and statistically insignificant, suggesting that the relationship between family structure and children’s long-term, economic outcomes is due in large part to the relationship between family structure and economic wellbeing in childhood.     

Extracurricular associations and college enrollment

There is consistent evidence that student involvement in extracurricular activities (EAs) is associated with numerous academic benefits, yet understanding how peer associations within EAs might influence this link is not well understood. Using Add Health’s comprehensive data on EA participation across 80 schools in the United States, we develop a novel measure of peer associations within EA activities. We find that EA participation with high achieving peers has a nontrivial link to college enrollment, even after considering individual, peer, and school-level factors. This suggests that school policies aimed at encouraging student exposure to high achieving peers in EAs could have an important impact on a student’s later educational outcomes.     

Parental investment in childhood and educational qualifications: Can greater parental involvement mediate the effects of socioeconomic disadvantage?

Parental involvement is important for later well-being since it conveys to children that parents are interested in their development. In socioeconomically disadvantaged homes this involvement becomes even more important. This paper asks: Can the social capital produced by greater parental involvement mediate some of the harmful effects of less financial capital? Data are from the National Child Development Study; a longitudinal study of children born in Britain in 1958. Results suggest that parental involvement does matter, but it depends on when involvement and economic hardship are measured, as well as type of involvement and parent gender. Father interest in education reduces the impact of economic hardship on education the most, especially at age 11. Both father and mother interest in school at age 16 have the largest direct impact on education. The frequency of outings with mother at age 11 also has a larger direct impact on education than outings with father, however, neither compare with the reduction in the effect of economic hardship as a result of father interest in school.     

Growth curve analyses of the relationship between early maternal age and children’s mathematics and reading performance

Regarding the methods used to examine the early maternal age-child academic outcomes relationship, the extant literature has tended to examine change using statistical analyses that fail to appreciate that individuals vary in their rates of growth. Of the one study I have been able to find that employs a true growth model to estimate this relationship, the authors only controlled for characteristics of the maternal household after family formation; confounding background factors of mothers that might select them into early childbearing, a possible source of bias, were ignored. The authors’ findings nonetheless suggested an inverse relationship between early maternal age, i.e., a first birth between the ages of 13 and 17, and Canadian adolescents’ mean math performance at age 10. Early maternal age was not related to the linear slope of age. To elucidate whether the early maternal age-child academic outcomes association, treated in a growth context, is consistent with this finding, the present study built on it using US data and explored children’s mathematics and reading trajectories from age 5 on. Its unique contribution is that it further explicitly controlled for maternal background factors and employed a three-level growth model with repeated measures of children nested within their mothers. Though the strength of the relationship varied between mean initial academic performance and mean academic growth, results confirmed that early maternal age was negatively related to children’s mathematics and reading achievement, net of post-teen first birth child-specific and maternal household factors. Once maternal background factors were included, there was no statistically significant relationship between early maternal age and either children’s mean initial mathematics and reading scores or their mean mathematics and reading growth.     

Family structure and the intergenerational transmission of educational advantage

I examine whether the effect of parents’ education on children’s educational achievement and attainment varies by family structure and, if so, whether this can be explained by differential parenting practices. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, I find that as parents’ education increases, children in single mother families experience a lower boost in their achievement test scores, likelihood of attending any post-secondary schooling, likelihood of completing a 4-year college degree, and years of completed schooling relative to children living with both biological parents. Differences in parents’ educational expectations, intergenerational closure, and children’s involvement in structured leisure activities partially explain these status transmission differences by family structure. The findings imply that, among children with highly educated parents, children of single mothers are less likely to be highly educated themselves relative to children who grow up with both biological parents.     

Chips off the old blocks? The political participation patterns of parents and children in Italy

This article studies the relationship between the political participation of parents and children in Italy, a country for which no empirical evidence on the topic is available and that has particular characteristics in terms of household dynamics and patterns of political participation. The analyses are based on a sample of 12,802 children from 14 to 19 years old and their parents, drawn from the “Multipurpose survey – Aspects of daily life”, collected by the Italian National Institute of Statistics. The results show that the political participation of children is strongly associated with that of their parents; that maternal participation is of somewhat greater relevance to the participation of both sons and daughters compared to that of fathers; and that the parents’ level of education is not associated with the likelihood of the child participating, net of parental participation.     

Perception vs. reality: The relationship between low-income homeownership, perceived financial stress, and financial hardship

This research examines how homeowners and renters were impacted by the financial crisis in 2009. We build from the hypothesis that homeownership provides people a sense of stability which decreases the extent to which they feel stressed as a result of financial hardship. Our study tests whether owning a home affected either the degree to which lower-income households experienced financial hardship or the extent to which they perceived they were financially stressed. Using a sample of lower-income borrowers who obtained affordable mortgages through the Community Advantage Program (CAP) and a comparison panel of renters, we collected data on the effects of the financial crisis. From a portfolio performance standpoint, CAP loans have performed relatively well. Our analysis of the survey data finds that, although both renters and owners experienced similar levels of financial hardship, the homeowners were less psychologically stressed overall and reported feeling more satisfied with their financial situation.     

金融产业集聚与区域经济增长

金融产业集聚对区域经济增长起着不容忽视的作用,本文在金融产业集聚对经济增长影响机理分析的基础上,选取我国生产性服务业的典型代表——北京市为案例,描述其金融产业集聚与经济增长状况,并基于6大主城区的数据,利用扩展的C-D函数及混合面板模型对金融产业集聚对区域经济增长的影响进行了实证检验.研究发现：北京市金融业已形成良好的金融集聚态势;金融业集聚对区域经济增长有着明显的正向促进作用.在此基础上,提出了进一步加强金融集聚及其对区域经济增长作用的政策建议.     

法治视野下高校学生参与管理的实证研究

研究以高校学生参与管理实证调查为基础,剖析了当前高校管理中学生参与现状及存在问题,并阐释了＂功效理性＂缺失、制度性支撑不足、大学生参与能力较低等导致问题存在的三大原因。研究表明,实现高校管理中学生的有序参与,需要增强学生参与的公民意识及能力、完善学生组织化参与的机理、畅通与健全学生参与的制度路径。     

The impact of cumulative family risks on various levels of food insecurity

The study uses the Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study (N = 2025) to examine the relationship between four cumulative family risk indices and refined measures of food hardship: marginal food security, low food security, and very low food security. Regression analyses indicate that cumulative family risk indices are useful in differentiating various levels of food insecurity. Specifically, the maternal poor health and risky health behaviors index is pertinent for distinguishing (1) food insecure from marginal food secure households and (2) very low food secure from low food secure households. In addition, the financial strain index is pertinent for differentiating between marginal food secure families from food secure families among non-poor households. Connecting food assistance programs with established social services may decrease the negative impact that cumulative family-level risk factors have on families’ varying levels of food insecurity.     

Maternal migration and child health: An analysis of disruption and adaptation processes in Benin

Children of migrant mothers have lower vaccination rates compared to their peers with non-migrant mothers in low-income countries. Explanations for this finding are typically grounded in the disruption and adaptation perspectives of migration. Researchers argue that migration is a disruptive process that interferes with women’s economic well-being and social networks, and ultimately their health-seeking behaviors. With time, however, migrant women adapt to their new settings, and their health behaviors improve. Despite prominence in the literature, no research tests the salience of these perspectives to the relationship between maternal migration and child vaccination. We innovatively leverage Demographic and Health Survey data to test the extent to which disruption and adaptation processes underlie the relationship between maternal migration and child vaccination in the context of Benin—a West African country where migration is common and child vaccination rates have declined in recent years. By disaggregating children of migrants according to whether they were born before or after their mother’s migration, we confirm that migration does not lower children’s vaccination rates in Benin. In fact, children born after migration enjoy a higher likelihood of vaccination, whereas their peers born in the community from which their mother eventually migrates are less likely to be vaccinated. Although we find no support for the disruption perspective of migration, we do find evidence of adaptation: children born after migration have an increased likelihood of vaccination the longer their mother resides in the destination community prior to their birth.     

Employment among married female college graduates

This paper investigates the effect of attitudinal factors on the employment of white married female college graduates with and without children. A model of the employment status of these women 3 and 7 years after graduation is estimated using data from the NORC longitudinal study of 1961 college graduates. Taste for housework was found to affect the employment of nonmothers only, whereas “child care ideology” affected the employment of mothers. Husband's income had a negative effect on the wife's working both in 1964 and in 1968. Age of youngest child in 1964 had a positive, and number of children a negative, impact on a mother's working in 1964. The negative effect on employment status in 1968 of the birth of a child between 1964 and 1968 was much greater for those women for whom it was a first birth than for those who already had children.     

Single-parent households and children’s educational achievement: A state-level analysis

Although many studies have examined associations between family structure and children’s educational achievement at the individual level, few studies have considered how the increase in single-parent households may have affected children’s educational achievement at the population level. We examined changes in the percentage of children living with single parents between 1990 and 2011 and state mathematics and reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Regression models with state and year fixed effects revealed that changes in the percentage of children living with single parents were not associated with test scores. Increases in maternal education, however, were associated with improvements in children’s test scores during this period. These results do not support the notion that increases in single parenthood have had serious consequences for U.S. children’s school achievement.     

浅析我国的贸易顺差问题——从人口角度分析

运用生命周期假说对中国两次"婴儿潮"进行分析,探讨中国人口相关因素对于储蓄的影响,以及储蓄增加与中国净出口之间的关联.在此基础上,实证分析投资、政府支出、储蓄与净出口的关系.基本的结论是:应正视中国人口增长所带来的内部矛盾,从内部解决矛盾,而不是通过外部的不平衡来平衡内部矛盾.     

Pathways of children’s long-term living arrangements: A latent class analysis

This study employed latent class analysis to create children’s family structure trajectories from birth through adolescence using merged mother and child data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 1870). Input variables distinguished between biological fathers and stepfathers as well as mother’s marriages and cohabitations. The best-fitting model revealed five latent trajectories of children’s long-term family structure: continuously married biological parents (55%), long-term single mothers (18%), married biological parents who divorce (12%), a highly unstable trajectory distinguished by gaining at least one stepfather (11%), and cohabiting biological parents who either marry or break up (4%). Multinomial logistic regression indicated that mother’s education, race, teen birth status, and family of origin characteristics were important predictors of the long-term family trajectories in which their children grew up. These findings suggest that latent class analysis is a valuable statistical tool for understanding children’s complete family structure experiences.