Bridging the Income-Parenting Gap: Three Papers on the Interrelationships of Household Income, Parenting Resources, and Child Outcomes.

Abstract

This dissertation demonstrates how parent distress, parenting practices, and early child care are major mechanisms through which family income is associated with child cognitive and behavior development. Specifically, higher income may ease parents’ stress from financial worries, enable investment and involvement in children’s enrichment, and allow access to high-quality child care services, improving subsequent child outcomes.

In Chapter 2, “Income and Child Outcomes: Testing a Model of Parent Distress and Parenting Practices as Mediators”, I employ structural equation modeling with data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Survey. Results show that parenting practices and parent distress mediate relationships between family income and child cognitive achievement and behavior problems five years later.

In Chapter 3, “Tweens to Teens: Testing a Model of Income Change and Changes in Child Outcomes during Adolescence”, I build on the findings of Chapter 2 by using fixed-effects models with data from the Child Development Survey. Results show that five-year changes in single-year household income are associated with concurrent changes in parent distress and parenting practices, but only among middle-income households. However, changes in parent distress and parenting practices are related to changes in child cognitive achievement and behavior problems for all children, regardless of whether they experienced changes in income.

Chapter 4, “Effects of Early Childhood Care Type on Cognitive Achievement and Behavior Problems”, examines the use and effects of non-parental child care using data from the Fragile Families Child Health and Wellbeing Study. High-quality center-based child care is often more accessible to advantaged families than to disadvantaged families, so conventionally estimated effects of care can be upwardly biased by this selection process. Yet even adjusting for this selection of more advantaged children into center-based care using inverse propensity weights, its use is associated with higher child cognitive achievement five years later, relative to care exclusively from parents.

In sum, I find that family income is related to child outcomes. However, income’s effects are largely mediated by other variables, namely parent distress, parenting practices, and quality of child care obtained by parents.