How Resource Dynamics Explain Accumulating Developmental and Health Disparities for Teen Parents’ Children
Stefanie Mollborn (mollborn@colorado.edu),
Elizabeth Lawrence,
Laurie James-Hawkins and
Paula Fomby
Demography, 2014, vol. 51, issue 4, 1199-1224
Abstract:
This study examines the puzzle of disparities experienced by U.S. teen parents’ young children, whose health and development increasingly lag behind those of peers while their parents are simultaneously experiencing socioeconomic improvements. Using the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (2001–2007; N ≈ 8,600), we assess four dynamic patterns in socioeconomic resources that might account for these growing developmental and health disparities throughout early childhood and then test them in multilevel growth curve models. Persistently low socioeconomic resources constituted the strongest explanation, given that consistently low income, maternal education, and assets fully or partially account for growth in cognitive, behavioral, and health disparities experienced by teen parents’ children from infancy through kindergarten. That is, although teen parents gained socioeconomic resources over time, those resources remained relatively low, and the duration of exposure to limited resources explains observed growing disparities. Results suggest that policy interventions addressing the time dynamics of low socioeconomic resources in a household, in terms of both duration and developmental timing, are promising for reducing disparities experienced by teen parents’ children. Copyright Population Association of America 2014
Keywords: Socioeconomic resources; Resource dynamics; Early childhood; Teen parenthood; Growth curve analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s13524-014-0301-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:demogr:v:51:y:2014:i:4:p:1199-1224
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/13524
DOI: 10.1007/s13524-014-0301-1
Access Statistics for this article
Demography is currently edited by John D. Iceland, Stephen A. Matthews and Jenny Van Hook
More articles in Demography from Springer, Population Association of America (PAA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla (sonal.shukla@springer.com) and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (indexing@springernature.com).