Thematic Areas
Interventions, Economic Security, and Child Development
Principal Investigator: Aletha C. HustonAdditional Investigators: Pamela Morris, Primary Investigator of parent project at MDRC
Greg Duncan, Co-Investigator, Northwestern University
Lisa Gennetian, Co-Investigator, MDRC
Funded by: MDRC
This project continues a collaborative relationship funded under the Next Generation Project, and is designed to understand how and under what circumstances parents' income, employment, and child care decisions affect the cognitive and emotional development of children and adolescents in low-income families. Dr. Huston's team is undertaking the analyses of child care effects using microdata from eight experiments that evaluated up to 15 welfare and antipoverty programs. Comprising almost 40,000 observations of children in single-parent families who were age 0 to 15 at the time of random assignment, the data include information about children's cognitive and behavioral well-being between two and five years after random assignment as well as detailed histories of parents' employment, welfare use, income, and child care decisions.