Children, Youth and Families
Over the past five years, the PRC has benefited from the strong commitment of the University of Texas to build in the area of Children and Families and has developed a nationally prominent research program in the area. Making an immediate impact, Aletha Huston joined the faculty in 1996 and has contributed extensive senior leadership, grant activity, and national recognition. More recently, the Departments of Human Ecology, Sociology, and Economics added junior faculty members to strengthen the area. The PRC has played a key setting for these researchers, housed in different colleges, to learn from and collaborate with one another. Consequently, we have seen an explosion of funded and published research on children and families. Much of this work centers on four sub-themes: 1) the causes and consequences of family change; 2) non-marital fertility; 3) the consequences of poverty and welfare reform for the lives of children; and 4) the effects of children's use of media on their development and well being.
Area Projects
Texas Teen Opportunity Project (T-TOP)
Principal Investigator: Kristine Hopkins
Additional Investigators: Catherine Cubbin and Kari L. White, Co-Investigators
Funded by: Texas Department of State Health Services
Teen fertility has generally been declining in the United States over the past 15 to 20 years and these declines have been especially pronounced for African Americans. This general good news is tempered somewhat by the fact that declines have been much smaller among Hispanics than among Anglos or African Americans. Whereas the decline in the teen fertility rate between 1990 and 2005 was about 50% for African Americans and Anglos, it was only about 33% among Latinas. What factors lead Latina adolescents to become pregnant? If and how are they different from other race/ethnic groups? This is a particularly important issue in Texas, a state where the Latino population is especially large and growing at a fast rate. To address this question, the project will conduct 48 race/ethnic-specific focus group interviews with young women, young men, and the parents of adolescents. The researchers will focus particularly on the a) Motivations for/against pregnancy; b) Knowledge about conception and contraception; c) Access to contraception, and d) Attitudes about contraception.
Family Instability and the Home Environment
Principal Investigator: Shannon E. Cavanagh
Funded by: National Center for Marriage Research, Bowling Green State University
Family scholars have identified a significant link between experiences of family instability and the contours of young people’s lives in the early life course. The theory that motivates much of this work posits that family transitions set into motion myriad changes in the home environment that, in turn, are stressful to children and increase the likelihood that their development is disrupted. And while differences in the home environment and child outcomes across family structure types has been established, data limitations have precluded scholars from mapping out the multiple pathways linking family transitions (especially multiple transitions), changes in the home environment, and stress in children’s lives.
The general goal of this proposed research, therefore, is to explore how family instability and changes in the home environment come together through two aims. First, using Structural Equation Modeling, I will investigate the pathways through which a family transition increases material hardships and parental stress, which, in turn, change the ways in which parents interact with and invest in their children and organize their home, paying special attention to how these pathways vary by transition type and age of children. Second, using latent growth modeling, I will examine how multiple changes in family structure factor into trajectories of parental stress, parent-child closeness, parental investments, and the organization of the home over time. I address these aims with the National Study of Child Care and Youth Development, a prospective study that follows children from birth though 5th grade, contains maternal reports of family structure at more than 25 time points, and includes state-of-the-art methods to capture family processes and the home environment nine times over the life of the study. This research will inform theory in this emerging field and improve conceptualization and operationalization of family instability at a time when the living arrangements of youth are increasingly fluid.
The Intergenerational Transmission of Family Instability
Principal Investigator: Shannon E. Cavanagh
Additional Investigators: R. Kelly Raley and Elizabeth Vandewater, Co-Investigators
Funded by: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was the first federal law to explicitly promote marriage and encourage the formation of two-parent families. Since then, proposed legislation has earmarked more than $1.5 billion to encourage states to design programs that encourage and support healthy marriage. A primary motivation for this is a belief that family instability negatively affects children. In this case, ideology is backed by social science research, which suggests that residing in alternative families (i.e., single parent, stepparent) does pose risks for children in ways that shape their futures. What remains less clear is why family instability in the parent generation affects well-being in the child generation, including children's own future marital trajectories. Is it the actual experience of family instability that is responsible for differences in children's life chances, characteristics of the mother that select children into these family structures, or a combination of both? The proposed project addresses these issues by: 1) examining the contribution of both family instability and related maternal characteristics to adjustment in middle childhood, 2) investigating the role in intra-family dynamics in explaining the effects of both family instability and related maternal characteristics, and 3) exploring how family instability, maternal selection characteristics, and youth adjustment come together to shape the transition to adulthood in ways that forecast unstable families in the child generation. To do this, we will use a set of regression techniques (path analysis, event history analysis) on cohorts drawn from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD), a prospective birth cohort study that collected detailed measures of family processes, state of the art measures of child adjustment, and household roster information more than 20 times from birth to 3rd grade, and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a nationally representative study of adolescence in 1995 that follows young people through the transition to adulthood and includes retrospective measures of family instability as well as union formation expectations and behaviors. By leveraging data sets that include rich measures and cover the early life course, findings from this project will provide a clearer picture of the factors that drive the intergenerational transmission of family instability, which will inform family policy. Family instability intimately shapes the opportunities and life chances of children and, at the population level, is associated with rising inequality among American children. Understanding how family instability is transmitted across generations can inform policy and intervention programs designed to ameliorate child well- being as family structure change becomes a ubiquitous feature of American childhood.
Raising Texas: Texas Early Childhood Comprehensive System (TECCS) Initiative
Principal Investigator: Mark D. Hayward
Additional Investigators: Cynthia Osborne, Co-Investigator
Funded by: Texas Health and Human Services Commission
The purpose of the TECCS plan is to create a seamless system through coordination and collaboration between and amongst agencies resulting in young children and their families receiving the information and services they need. The Maternal and Child Health Bureau’s purpose for this grant is “to support States to plan, develop and ultimately implement collaborations and partnerships that support families and communities in their development of children that are healthy and ready to learn at school entry.
A Comparative Study of School Readiness and Child Well-Being
Principal Investigator: Aletha C. Huston
Additional Investigators: Greg Duncan, Parent Project PI, Northwestern University
Funded by: Spencer Foundation
Although educational success is an important determinant of children’s life chances and their wellbeing, the role of early academic and behavioral skills that facilitate learning and later school success is widely debated but poorly understood. Some believe that a basic foundation of early math and literacy skills is a prerequisite for making a successful transition into formal schooling, while others regard behaviors such as paying attention and working well with others as of equal if not greater importance. Our own prior analysis of six longitudinal data sets found that children’s later achievement was predicted by their early academic and attention skills, but not by early socioemotional skills, including problem behaviors and social skills. However, by leaving two important questions unasked, these recent findings may not provide a full picture of how children’s behavior affects their learning and educational success.
We propose two studies to address questions about the impact and evolution of children’s academic and behavioral skills over the course of primary school. First, how do school-entry academic skills as well as attention and socioemotional behaviors affect learning-related behavioral outcomes and school progress? While achievement tests are an important marker of educational progress, ultimate school success depends both on academic performance and progression as well as refraining from negative school-related behaviors such as disengagement, conflict with teachers, suspensions and dropping out.
Second, what are the nature and determinants of academic and behavioral skill trajectories? In these analyses, we use trajectory modeling to understand the dynamic associations between changes in reading and math achievement, attention skills and socioemotional behaviors over the course of primary school. This analysis will consider both whether some children’s behavior problems emerge as a result of achievement difficulties and whether behavior problems that develop during elementary school are detrimental to later learning.
We expect that the knowledge generated from our proposed research will contribute to a conceptual model of learning and development which may be used to guide the curricula of preschool programs, as well as point to promising interventions during the primary school years that may increase both learning and educational success.
Evaluation of a Program for Infant/toddler Caregivers (PITC)
Principal Investigator: Aletha C. Huston
Funded by: Berkeley Policy Associates, WestEd
This study is testing the effectiveness of PITC across the western region served by WestEd to build the connection of infant/toddler care to school readiness, consistent with NCLB. Programs from the PITC waiting list will be randomly assigned to treatment and control groups, including samples of both family childcare and group childcare centers. Child assessments will be completed at least twice, and ideally three times, for a cohort of students within a center: at baseline (at the same time as the baseline program assessment), at the end of Year 1, and at the end of Year 3. Because of the age of the children, the early childhood assessments will be primarily observational. Later measurement will use a test of cognitive skill or school readiness.
Teenagers, Families, and Well-Being
Principal Investigator: Su Yeong Kim
Funded by: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
The proposed study focuses on culturally-relevant developmental processes that are important for understanding the successful adjustment of children of immigrants in the United States. In immigrant families, Portes and Rumbaut (2001) identify generational dissonance as a family context that places children at increased risk for poor developmental outcomes. We currently know little about the mediating mechanisms that explain this relationship. Uncovering these mechanisms is important, as they may represent possible targets of intervention to increase the likelihood of successful adjustment among children of immigrants. The proposed study tests whether unsupportive parenting may operate as a mediator of the link between generational dissonance and child outcomes. The study further tests whether fathers' and mothers' parenting independently mediate the proposed relationship. It uses both cross-sectional and longitudinal self-reported survey data from mothers, fathers, and adolescents in Asian immigrant families, specifically Chinese Americans. In summary, there are three research aims. First, to test concurrent and longitudinal relations between generational dissonance and (a) unsupportive parenting, (b) adolescents' depressive symptoms, and (c) school performance. Second, to concurrently and longitudinally test whether unsupportive parenting mediates the relationship between parent-child acculturation discrepancy and adolescents' depressive symptoms and school performance. Third, we aim to test whether parent gender moderates the relationships tested in Aims 1 and 2. The proposed study is relevant to public health because it focuses on the developmental outcomes of children of immigrants, a growing and significant segment of America's children who will represent the future of U.S. workforce. It also focuses on the developmental period of early and middle adolescence, a susceptible period of transition when there are increases in socio-emotional problems that can compromise school performance. Finally, the study has the potential for identifying modifiable mediators that can be used to inform future preventive intervention work with children of immigrants.
Social Ties and Health Behavior Over the Life Course
Principal Investigator: Debra Umberson
Additional Investigators: Robert A. Hummer, Daniel A. Powers, Co-Investigators
Consultants: John Mirowsky, Marc Musick, James House
Funded by: National Institute on Aging
Analyzing longitudinal data from a four-wave national survey covering a fifteen year time span (the Americans' Changing Lives-ACL), Dr. Umberson will create a comprehensive assessment of social ties and health behavior over the life course by: (1) Developing profiles of health behavior trajectories over time and in relation to age, race, and gender, (2) Considering how the impact of different types of social ties on health behavior varies over the life course and by race and gender, and (3) Considering whether the most important psychosocial mechanisms linking social ties and specific health behaviors depend on age, race, or gender.
