Future of Children最新文献

Since modern welfare reform began in the 1980s, we have seen low-income parents leave the welfare rolls and join the workforce in large numbers. At the same time, the Earned Income Tax Credit has offered a monetary incentive for low-income parents to work. Thus, unlike some of the other two-generation mechanisms discussed in this issue of Future of Children, policies that encourage low-income parents to work are both widespread and well-entrenched in the United States. But parents' (and especially mothers') work, writes Carolyn Heinrich, is not unambiguously beneficial for their children. On the one hand, working parents can be positive role models for their children, and, of course, the income they earn can improve their children's lives in many ways. On the other hand, work can impair the developing bond between parents and young children, especially when the parents work long hours or evening and night shifts. The stress that parents bring home from their jobs can detract from their parenting skills, undermine the atmosphere in the home, and thereby introduce stress into children's lives. Unfortunately, it is low-income parents who are most likely to work in stressful, low-quality jobs that feature low pay, little autonomy, inflexible hours, and few or no benefits. And low-income children whose parents are working are more likely to be placed in inadequate child care or to go unsupervised. Two-generation approaches, Heinrich writes, could maximize the benefits and minimize the detriments of parents' work by expanding workplace flexibility, and especially by mandating enough paid leave so that mothers can breastfeed and form close bonds with their infants; by helping parents place their children in high-quality child care; and by helping low-income parents train for, find, and keep a well-paying job with benefits.

Better-educated parents generally have children who are themselves better educated, healthier, wealthier, and better off in almost every way than the children of the less educated. But this simple correlation does not prove that the relationship is causal. Neeraj Kaushal sifts through the evidence from economics and public policy and reviews large national and international studies to conclude that, indeed, education has large intergenerational payoffs in many areas of children's lives, and that these payoffs persist over time. Kaushal shows that, if anything, traditional measures of returns to education--which focus on income and productivity--almost certainly underestimate the beneficial effects that parents' education has on their children. She reports causal positive effects not only on children's test scores, health, and behavior, but also on mothers' behaviors that can affect their children's wellbeing, such as teenage childbearing and substance use. Her findings suggest that, as a component of two-generation programs, helping parents extend their education could go a long way toward reducing inequality across generations and promoting children's healthy development. Thus the rationale for two-generation programs that boost parents' education is compelling. However, Kaushal cautions, the U.S. education system reinforces socioeconomic inequality across generations by spending more money on educating richer children than on educating poorer children. By themselves, then, two-generation programs will not necessarily ameliorate the structural factors that perpetuate inequality in this country.

For poor families, the possession of assets--savings accounts, homes, and the like--has the potential not only to relieve some of the stress of living in poverty but also to make a better future seem like a real possibility. If children in families that own certain assets fare better than children in families without them, then helping poor families build those assets would be an effective strategy for two-generation programs. Indeed, write Michal Grinstein-Weiss, Trina Williams Shanks, and Sondra Beverly, plenty of evidence shows that assets are connected to positive outcomes for poor children. For example, young people who have any college savings at all, even a very small amount, are more likely to go to college; children in households with assets score higher on standardized achievement tests; and children of homeowners experience fewer behavioral problems. But this evidence comes from longitudinal data sets and is therefore correlational. Looking for causal relationships, the authors examine the results of experimental programs that opened various types of savings accounts for poor people and matched their contributions. Several of these trials included a control group that did not receive a savings account, making it possible to attribute any positive outcomes directly to the savings accounts rather than to their owners' personal characteristics. These programs dispelled the myth that poor people can't save; participants were generally able to accumulate savings. It's too early to tell, however, whether assets and asset-building programs have long-term effects on children's wellbeing, though one experiment found positive impacts on disadvantaged children's social-emotional development at age four. The most promising programs share several features: they are opened early in life; they are opened automatically, with no action required from the recipients; and they come with an initial deposit.

Parents' health and children's health are closely intertwined--healthier parents have healthier children, and vice versa. Genetics accounts for some of this relationship, but much of it can be traced to environment and behavior, and the environmental and behavioral risk factors for poor health disproportionately affect families living in poverty. Unhealthy children are likely to become unhealthy adults, and poor health drags down both their educational attainment and their income. Because of the close connection between parents' and children's health, write Sherry Glied and Don Oellerich, we have every reason to believe that programs to improve parents' health will improve their children's health as well. Yet few programs aim to work this way, except for a narrow category of programs that target pregnant women, newborns, and very young children. Glied and Oellerich assess these programs, discuss why there are so few of them, and suggest ways to expand them. Their chief conclusion is that structural barriers in the U.S. healthcare system stand in the way of such programs. Some of these barriers have to do with health insurance, access to care, and benefits, but the biggest one is the fact that physicians typically specialize in treating either children or adults, rather than families as a whole. The Affordable Care Act has begun to break down some of these barriers, the authors write, but much remains to be done.

Families who live in poverty face disadvantages that can hinder their children's development in many ways, write Greg Duncan, Katherine Magnuson, and Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal. As they struggle to get by economically, and as they cope with substandard housing, unsafe neighborhoods, and inadequate schools, poor families experience more stress in their daily lives than more affluent families do, with a host of psychological and developmental consequences. Poor families also lack the resources to invest in things like high-quality child care and enriched learning experiences that give more affluent children a leg up. Often, poor parents also lack the time that wealthier parents have to invest in their children, because poor parents are more likely to be raising children alone or to work nonstandard hours and have inflexible work schedules. Can increasing poor parents' incomes, independent of any other sort of assistance, help their children succeed in school and in life? The theoretical case is strong, and Duncan, Magnuson, and Votruba-Drzal find solid evidence that the answer is yes--children from poor families that see a boost in income do better in school and complete more years of schooling, for example. But if boosting poor parents' incomes can help their children, a crucial question remains: Does it matter when in a child's life the additional income appears? Developmental neurobiology strongly suggests that increased income should have the greatest effect during children's early years, when their brains and other systems are developing rapidly, though we need more evidence to prove this conclusively. The authors offer examples of how policy makers could incorporate the findings they present to create more effective programs for families living in poverty. And they conclude with a warning: if a boost in income can help poor children, then a drop in income--for example, through cuts to social safety net programs like food stamps--can surely harm them.

Children's early social experiences shape their developing neurological and biological systems for good or for ill, writes Ross Thompson, and the kinds of stressful experiences that are endemic to families living in poverty can alter children's neurobiology in ways that undermine their health, their social competence, and their ability to succeed in school and in life. For example, when children are born into a world where resources are scarce and violence is a constant possibility, neurobiological changes may make them wary and vigilant, and they are likely to have a hard time controlling their emotions, focusing on tasks, and forming healthy relationships. Unfortunately, these adaptive responses to chronic stress serve them poorly in situations, such as school and work, where they must concentrate and cooperate to do well. But thanks to the plasticity of the developing brain and other biological systems, the neurobiological response to chronic stress can be buffered and even reversed, Thompson writes, especially when we intervene early in children's lives. In particular, warm and nurturing relationships between children and adults can serve as a powerful bulwark against the neurobiological changes that accompany stress, and interventions that help build such relationships have shown particular promise. These programs have targeted biological parents, of course, but also foster parents, teachers and other caregivers, and more distant relatives, such as grandparents. For this reason, Thompson suggests that the concept of two-generation programs may need to be expanded, and that we should consider a "multigenerational" approach to helping children living in poverty cope and thrive in the face of chronic stress.

As this issue of the Future of Children makes clear, we have much yet to learn about military children and their families. A big part of the reason, write Anita Chandra and Andrew London, is that we lack sufficiently robust sources of data. Until we collect more and better data about military families, Chandra and London say, we will not be able to study the breadth of their experiences and sources of resilience, distinguish among subgroups within the diverse military community, or compare military children with their civilian counterparts. After surveying the available sources of data and explaining what they are lacking and why, Chandra and London make several recommendations. First, they say, major longitudinal national surveys, as well as administrative data systems (for example, in health care and in schools), should routinely ask about children's connections to the military, so that military families can be flagged in statistical analyses. Second, questions on national surveys and psychological assessments should be formulated and calibrated for military children to be certain that they resonate with military culture. Third, researchers who study military children should consider adopting a life-course perspective, examining children from birth to adulthood as they and their families move through the transitions of military life and into or out of the civilian world.