Much of the variation in adult income in the United States is
related to family background during childhood. One-third to
one-half of children who are poor for a substantial part of their
childhood will be poor as adults. Welfare participation is also
substantially correlated across generations. Widening income
inequality in the U.S. has been accompanied by a widening
achievement gap between children living in high- vs. low-income
families.
Across the social sciences, our Faculty Affiliates are engaging
in projects aimed at better understanding and isolating the
causal relationships between parents’ socioeconomic status and
their children’s eventual ability to escape poverty. Research
Affiliates are also investigating how the stressors that many
poor children face affect their emotional development and
behaviors.
Do mothers’ biological responses to stress transfer to her child?
This is a question addressed in a recently published study by
Leah Hibel of UC Davis and Evelyn Mercado of UCLA. Though prior
reports have shown that mothers help their children regulate
distress through calming and soothing, there are few studies that
examine the ways in which a mother facing stress might transmit
stress to her child. This study shows that mothers transmit
stress to their infants and that mothers’ emotions appear to play
a role in this transmission.
The idea that individuals can escape poverty through hard work is
a fundamental tenant of American society. Intergenerational
mobility is lower in the United States than in any other
developed country in the world. One in ten American children
spends at least half of their childhood in poverty. Understanding
the mechanisms that lie behind the intergenerational transmission
of poverty is necessary in order to design effective policies to
improve poor children’s life chances.
In the classroom at Kit Carson Middle School in Sacramento,
Michal Kurlaender sits at one of four small desks pushed to face
each other. The walls are papered in yellow, red and bright blue,
and wavy corrugated borders frame a flutter of papers under the
banner “AMAZING.”
Kurlaender is interviewing a teacher as part of her evaluation of
the school’s teacher development program to improve students’
college readiness skills. The sudden, grating buzz of the class
bell startles everyone. Kurlaender smiles. “It’s nicer when it’s
the music instead,” she says.
In his lab by the freeway in Davis, Ross Thompson, a
developmental psychologist, pulls a plush monkey puppet onto each
hand and stands behind a cardboard “stage.” A red curtain hangs
across a cutout in the front.
“We would normally have animated voices and all the rest,” he
says. “If you do this in a way that is within the child’s
capabilities, you will find that they have a much richer sense of
themselves psychologically than we give them credit for.”
Over the past 45 years, the United States has experienced a
rising standard of living, with real GDP per capita more than
doubling between 1959 and 2004. In contrast, living standards
among some groups seem to have stagnated. Although a number of
studies have documented a correlation between macroeconomic
conditions and poverty, the relationship is not as simple, or as
strong, as one might think. What additional factors can explain
the starkly different trends in economic well-being that are
measured by overall GDP growth and the poverty rate?
Children of immigrants currently make up one in four of all
children in the United States, and this proportion is expected to
increase to one-third by 2050. On average, children of immigrants
are more likely than children of natives to live in poverty,
experience food insecurity, and live in crowded housing.
Additionally, they are less likely than children of natives to
receive public assistance or to have health insurance. In this
project, investigators provide a comprehensive picture of the
health of children of immigrants in comparison to children of
natives using recent, nationally representative data.
After decades of studying dysfunction and maladjustment, social
and behavioral scientists have begun to recognize the importance
of environmental⁄ contextual and dispositional factors that
promote or facilitate healthy development. Researchers consider
the interface between socioeconomic status (SES) and markers of
healthy functioning across multiple generations of family
members, focusing on positive development in order to offer
alternative pathways for interventions and programs focused on
promotion of resilience under stressful conditions.
Considerable evidence shows that low socioeconomic status (SES)
is associated with poorer physical health, emotional well-being,
and cognitive functioning for both children and adults. SES also
appears to be an important predictor of problem behaviors in
childhood and adolescence, such as delinquency, aggression,
conduct problems at school, and other externalizing behaviors.
Health outcomes for children and adults vary dramatically across
neighborhoods, even after statistically controlling for various
individual- or family-level risk and protective factors. These
patterns have generated concern among both policymakers and
scientists that health outcomes may be causally affected by
neighborhood attributes. In this paper, researchers estimate the
causal effects on child mortality from moving into less
distressed neighborhood environments.
Since the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 (CAAA), atmospheric
concentration of local pollutants has fallen drastically. A
natural question is whether further reductions will yield
additional health benefits. Investigators in this project further
this research by addressing two related research questions: (1)
what is the impact of automobile driving (and especially
congestion) on ambient air pollution levels, and (2) what is the
impact of modern air pollution levels on infant health? These
questions directly impact children living in congested,
impoverished neighborhoods.
While parents are judged constantly, by fellow parents and by
wider society, the consequences of judging parents may extend
beyond community reputation and social status: one of the
harshest potential consequences of parental judgement is the
state’s termination of parental rights. In these cases,
impoverished parents who live in rural places suffer harsher
judgements as they do not have ready access to state supported
parenting programs. This project calls attention to the plight of
poor rural families in gaining access to state funded programs
that would improve their parenting outcomes.
While literature suggests that early patterns of aggressive
behavior in both girls and boys are predictive of a variety
of health risks in adulthood, a longitudinal
examination of the predictive links between
childhood aggression, negative physical health
outcomes in adulthood and overall use of health care
has not been done. This study investigates the use of
health care and a variety of physical health
outcomes in adulthood in order to extend the current body
of knowledge regarding the long-term negative sequelae
of childhood aggression.
Is there a positive health impact to families receiving the
Earned Income Tax Credit, a central piece in the U.S. safety net
for families with children? Researchers conclude that the
sizeable increase in income for eligible families significantly
improved birth outcomes for both whites and African Americans,
with larger impacts for births to African American mothers.
