Housing crowding effects on children’s wellbeing

The degree to which children grow up in crowded housing is a neglected but potentially important aspect of social inequality. Poor living conditions can serve as a mechanism of social stratification, affecting children’s wellbeing and resulting in the intergenerational transmission of social inequality. This paper reports an investigation of housing crowding on children’s academic achievement, behavior, and health in the US and Los Angeles, a city with atypically high levels of crowding. We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics’ Child Development Supplement and the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey to explore the effect of living in a crowded home on an array of child wellbeing indicators. We find that several dimensions of children’s wellbeing suffer when exposed to crowded living conditions, particularly in Los Angeles, even after controlling for socioeconomic status. The negative effects on children raised in crowded homes can persist throughout life, affecting their future socioeconomic status and adult wellbeing.     

Immigrant and native financial well-being: The roles of place of education and race/ethnicity

Immigrants’ integration into U.S. society has occupied the interest of both scholars and the general public throughout the nation’s history. This paper draws on and refines dominance-differentiation theory to explore how immigrants’ place of education (whether they completed their education in the United States or abroad) and racial/ethnic status differentially affect their ability to integrate into U.S. society. Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation and wealth attainment as an indicator of economic integration, this paper finds mixed evidence for dominance-differentiation theory. Foreign education is associated with lower wealth attainment and race/ethnicity serves as an important stratifying factor for blacks and Latinos; however, there is little support for the theory when comparing the wealth attainment of immigrants with their same-race/co-ethnic native-born peers. This paper concludes with a discussion of why place of education matters for wealth attainment in the United States and explores its implications for both educational and racial/ethnic stratification among U.S. immigrants.     

Maternal employment when children are in preschool: Variations by race,ethnicity, and nativity

Preschool programs in the United States have expanded dramatically in recent decades. There has been significant scholarly attention to the implications of this for inequalities in children's educational outcomes, but less attention to the implications for the work-family lives of parents. Drawing on data from 2001 to 2017 American Community Surveys, this paper examines how children's preschool enrollment is associated with maternal employment, with particular attention to differences by mothers' race, ethnicity, and nativity. Findings document unequal access to preschool programs across groups but also different patterns of association between children's preschool enrollment and maternal employment. Immigrant mothers are doubly disadvantaged compared to their U.S.-born counterparts: Children are less likely to attend preschool, and when they do attend, this does little to facilitate maternal employment. The paper's conclusion addresses limitations of existing preschool programs for work-family reconciliation, but also emphasizes that limitations are more severe for some families than others.