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1. Human Capital and Voting Behavior across Generations: Evidence from an Income Intervention

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305541900090X  

   AKEE, RANDALL; COPELAND, WILLIAM; HOLBEIN, JOHN B.; SIMEONOVA, EMILIA (May 2020, American Political Science Review)

   null (Ed.)

   Despite clear evidence of a sharp income gradient in voting participation, it remains unclear whether income truly causes voting. In this article, we investigate how exogenous increases in unearned income affect voting in U.S. elections for two generations (parents and children) from the same household. In contrast to predictions made by current models of voting, we find the income shock had no effect on parents’ voting behaviors. However, we also find that increasing household income has heterogeneous effects on the civic participation of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. It increases children’s voting propensity among those raised in initially poorer families—resulting in substantially narrowed participatory gaps. Our results are consistent with a more nuanced view of how individual resources affect patterns of voting than the dominant theoretical framework of voting—the resource model—allows. Voting is fundamentally shaped by the human capital accrued long before citizens are eligible to vote. 

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2. US and Chinese preschoolers normalize household labor inequality

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2301781120  

   Midgette, Allegra J; Ma, Danyang; Stowe, Lucy M; Chernyak, Nadia (September 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   Across many cultural contexts, the majority of women conduct the majority of their household labor. This gendered distribution of labor is often unequal, and thus represents one of the most frequently experienced forms of daily inequality because it occurs within one’s own home. Young children are often passive observers of their family’s distribution of labor, and yet little is known about the developmental onset of their perceptions of it. By the preschool age, children also show strong normative feelings about both equal resource distribution and gender stereotypes. To investigate the developmental onset of children’s recognition of the (in)equality of household labor, we interviewed 3 to 10-y-old children in two distinct cultural contexts (US and China) and surveyed their caregivers about who does more household labor across a variety of tasks. Even at the youngest ages and in both cultural contexts, children’s reports largely matched their parents’, with both populations reporting that mothers do the majority of household labor. Both children and parents judged this to be generally fair, suggesting that children are observant of the gendered distribution of labor within their households, and show normalization of inequality from a young age. Our results point to preschool age as a critical developmental time period during which it is important to have parent-child discussions about structural constraints surrounding gender norms and household labor. 

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3. Child Overdoses Amid the Deaths-of-Despair Epidemic: Racial and Ethnic Differences in Intergenerational and Network Diffusion

   Corina Graif, Christopher Seto (April 2022, Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America)

   Since the early 2000s, contributors to the deaths-of-despair epidemic such as alcohol and drug related deaths have more than doubled. Evidence of the role of patient networks in the diffusion of prescription behaviors among physicians and of intra-household diffusion of opioids use contribute to important new questions about the population level effects of workplace- and intergenerational networks. This study responds to this need by expanding the focus from households and opioids overdose risk to examine the role of intergenerational and commuting networks in the diffusion of overdose risk from alcohol and drugs more generally among children. Analyses using negative binomial regression combined with computational statistics approaches such as cross-validation and permutation indicated that exposures to extra-local network overdose risks were associated with local adult- and child overdose deaths. These associations remained significant after controlling for multiple socioeconomic and demographic factors. The results showed that the link between network overdose risk and local child overdose deaths was accounted for in large part by intergenerational effects. Above and beyond intergenerational and spatial diffusion, network effects remained significant for Black children. High concentrations of other white residents protected white children against overdose risk but none of the minority groups. In turn, higher concentration of minority residents protected Black and Hispanic children. Higher population density increased the risk of overdose deaths among adults of all racial and ethnic groups, consistent with expectations of social and economic strain. However, it decreased the risk among children, consistent with social control expectations. Implications for future research and policy are discussed. 

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4. Continuity and Change in U.S. Children's Family Composition, 1968–2017

   https://doi.org/10.1215/00703370-9783507  

   Fomby, Paula; Johnson, David S. (March 2022, Demography)

   Abstract We document changes in U.S. children's family household composition from 1968 to 2017 with regard to the number and types of kin that children lived with and the frequency of family members' household entrances and departures. Data are from the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (N = 30,412). Children experienced three decades of increasing instability and diversification in household membership, arriving at a state of “stable complexity” in the most recent decade. Stable complexity is distinguished by a decline in the number of coresident parents; a higher number of stepparents, grandparents, and other relatives in children's households; and less turnover in household membership compared with prior decades, including fewer sibling departures. College-educated households with children were consistently the most stable and least diverse. On several dimensions, household composition has become increasingly similar for non-Hispanic Black and White children. Children in Hispanic households are distinct in having larger family sizes and more expected household entrances and departures by coresident kin. 

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5. Intergenerational Associations between Parents’ and Children’s Adverse Childhood Experience Scores

   https://doi.org/10.3390/children8090747  

   Schickedanz, Adam; Escarce, José J.; Halfon, Neal; Sastry, Narayan; Chung, Paul J. (September 2021, Children)

   Background: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are stressful childhood events associated with behavioral, mental, and physical illness. Parent experiences of adversity may indicate a child’s adversity risk, but little evidence exists on intergenerational links between parents’ and children’s ACEs. This study examines these intergenerational ACE associations, as well as parent factors that mediate them. Methods: The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) 2013 Main Interview and the linked PSID Childhood Retrospective Circumstances Study collected parent and child ACE information. Parent scores on the Aggravation in Parenting Scale, Parent Disagreement Scale, and the Kessler-6 Scale of Emotional Distress were linked through the PSID 1997, 2002, and 2014 PSID Childhood Development Supplements. Multivariate linear and multinomial logistic regression models estimated adjusted associations between parent and child ACE scores. Results: Among 2205 parent-child dyads, children of parents with four or more ACEs had 3.25-fold (23.1% [95% CI 15.9–30.4] versus 7.1% [4.4–9.8], p-value 0.001) higher risk of experiencing four or more ACEs themselves, compared to children of parents without ACEs. Parent aggravation, disagreement, and emotional distress were partial mediators. Conclusions: Parents with higher ACE scores are far more likely to have children with higher ACEs. Addressing parenting stress, aggravation, and discord may interrupt intergenerational adversity cycles. 

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