How Resource Dynamics Explain Accumulating Developmental and Health Disparities for Teen Parents’ Children

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

Identities in context: how social class shapes inequalities in education

Educational inequalities between social classes are large and persistent in the UK. Students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds have much lower attainment and engage less with education than their peers. Although structural factors contribute significantly to these inequalities, social psychological processes also play a crucial but less visible role. We draw on the social identity approach to propose a new model of how social and cultural factors in the local educational context shape the meaning of people’s social class identities in ways that create and sustain inequalities. Our identities-in-context model brings into focus educational contexts in which lower-class people: are expected to perform badly; are not well represented in high status educational roles or institutions; and are negatively disposed towards education. We argue that, for lower-class people, these contexts ignite a sense of social identity threat and incompatibility between their background and doing well in education. These, in turn, lead to poorer educational outcomes. We propose ways in which our model can be used to inform social psychological interventions that aim to reduce educational inequalities between social classes