Does mothers’ employment affect children’s development? Evidence from the children of the British 1970 Birth Cohort and the American NLSY79

Background: The increasing employment of mothers of young children in the UK and the USA is believed to affect children adversely. Maternity leave and part-time employment, more common in the UK than the US, are possible offsets.Methods: This paper analyses the cognitive and behavioural development of school aged children by maternal employment before the child’s first birthday. Data come from the second generation of two cohort studies: the 1970 British Birth Cohort Study (BCS70) and the US 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth Child (NLSY79). Both contain several outcomes per child, in some cases several children per mother. The hierarchical structure is tackled by multi-level modelling. The BCS70 provides data back to birth for the mothers we study, and the NLSY79 started collecting data from mothers in their early to mid teens, thus supplying a good array of controls for confounding variables (such as maternal education and ability, family history) which may affect labour market participation.Results: Similar to other studies, results are mixed and modest. Only two out of five US estimates of maternal employment in the child’s first year have a significant (0.05 level) coefficient on child development – negative for reading comprehension, positive for freedom from internalized behaviour problems. None of the estimates were significant for four child outcomes modelled in Britain. Conclusions: There is little evidence of harm to school-age children from maternal employment during a child's infancy, especially if employment is part-time, and in a context where several months of maternity leave is the norm. .

Social Connections in the Inner City: Examination across the Life Course

Social connectedness has been shown to be related to health and well-being, yet there is little knowledge about its developmental and intergenerational origins.  We examine the childhood, family, and neighborhood origins of social connectedness in young adulthood in a cohort of African American children (N=1242) from Chicago followed since 1966.  The five measures of social connections are:  political involvement, organizational membership, church involvement, family ties, and friend ties.  In multivariate analyses, predictors of social connectedness were found across the life course:  first grade social adaptation to school, childhood family resources, family social participation, adult neighborhood characteristics, social class, and marital status.   We conclude that adult social connections have roots in childhood behavior and social involvement, family resources and family social connections as well as one’s own resources and the neighborhood where one lives.

Handling attrition and non-response in longitudinal data

oai:edrev.asu.edu:article/21Procedures for handling attrition and missing data in longitudinal studies are discussed. A multiple imputation (MI) strategy is developed that can be applied to complex multilevel data. It is both general and statistically efficient and estimation software is available. An example of its use is given

Family Socialization, Economic Self-Efficacy, and the Attainment of Financial Independence in Early Adulthood

The attainment of financial independence is a key marker of the contemporary transition to adulthood.  In this study we ask, how do young adults gain the capacity to support themselves?  We contend that communication about work in the family during adolescence is an essential precursor of economic self-efficacy during adolescence and financial independence in early adulthood.  Drawing upon rich longitudinal data that span adolescence and young adulthood, we first ask whether family communication and socialization practices surrounding work and finances influence the development of ways of thinking about oneself that imply self-reliance and confidence in the economic domain (economic self-efficacy).  Second, we assess whether these components of the family’s economic climate have long-term influences on the transition to adulthood, status attainment, and financial independence. Our findings indicate that direct communications about work with parents foster the development of economic self-efficacy.   This positive dimension of the self-concept fosters achievement during the transition to adulthood (e.g., educational achievement, employment status, and income attainment), which, in turn, heighten financial independence.  In contrast, looking to parents for money during adolescence (that is, receiving a regular allowance) appears to diminish economic self-efficacy and does not promote socioeconomic attainment

Long-term trends in BMI: are contemporary childhood BMI growth references appropriate when looking at historical datasets?

Background Body mass index (BMI) is the most widely used surrogate measure of adiposity, and BMI z-scores are often calculated when comparing childhood BMI between populations and population sub-groups. Several growth references are currently used as the basis for calculation of such z-scores, for both contemporary cohorts as well as cohorts born decades ago. Due to the widely acknowledged increases in childhood obesity over recent years it is generally assumed that older birth cohorts would have lower BMIs relative to the current standards. However, this reasonable assumption has not been formally tested.   Methods Two growth references (1990 UK and 2000 CDC) are used to calculate BMI z-scores in three historical British national birth cohorts (National Survey of Health and Development (1958), National Child Development Study (1958) and British Cohort Study (1970)). BMI z-scores are obtained for each child at each follow-up age using the lambda-mu-sigma (LMS) method, and their distributions examined.   Results Across all three cohorts, median BMI z-score at each follow-up age is observed to be positive in early childhood. This is contrary to what might have been expected given the assumed temporal increase in childhood BMI. However, z-scores then decrease and become negative during adolescence, before increasing once more.   Conclusions The differences in BMI distribution between the historical cohorts and the contemporary growth references appear systematic and similar across the cohorts. This might be explained by contemporary reference data describing a faster tempo of weight increase relative to height than observed in older birth cohorts. Comparisons using z-scores over extended periods of time should therefore be interpreted with caution