Objective
This study examines intergenerational continuities in relationship instability, general relationship quality, and intimate partner violence (IPV) between mothers and adolescents.
Background
...A growing body of literature has observed similarities in relationship quality between parents and their adult offspring. Less attention has focused on whether intergenerational continuities are present in adolescent relationships.
Method
Using age 3, 5, 9, and 15 data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing birth cohort study (N = 3,162), the authors examined the associations between maternal reports of relationship instability, general quality, and IPV in early and middle childhood and similar adolescent reports at age 15. Variations based on the timing and persistence of exposures were considered.
Results
In general, exposures to low‐quality maternal relationships were associated with a higher risk of forming adolescent partnerships and lower relationship quality. Intergenerational links in quality were predominantly construct specific, consistent with observational learning processes. Adolescents exposed to maternal relationships of poor general quality in middle childhood were less likely to report high‐quality relationships themselves, and those exposed to any maternal physical IPV victimization during childhood were more likely to perpetrate IPV in their own relationships. Exposure to maternal relationship instability in both early and middle childhood was associated with more adolescent romantic partners.
Conclusion
The study illuminates additional pathways through which healthy and unhealthy relationships are reproduced across generations.
Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, this study examined the effects of the Great Recession on maternal harsh parenting. We found that changes in macroeconomic conditions, ...rather than current conditions, affected harsh parenting, that declines in macroeconomic conditions had a stronger impact on harsh parenting than improvements in conditions, and that mothers’ responses to adverse economic conditions were moderated by the DRD2 Taq1A genotype. We found no evidence of a moderating effect for two other, less well-studied SNPs from the DRD4 and DAT1 genes.
Prior research suggests considerable heterogeneity in the advantages of living in a 2-parent family. Specifically, children living with married biological parents exhibit more favorable outcomes than ...children living with cohabiting biological parents and with married and cohabiting stepparents. To explain these differences, researchers have focused almost exclusively on differences in the levels of factors such as income, parental relationship quality, and parenting quality across family types. In this study the authors examined whether differences in the benefits associated with these factors might also account for some of the variation in children's cognition and social-emotional development. Focusing on children at the time they enter kindergarten, they found only weak evidence of differences in benefits across family types. Instead, they found that children living in stepfather families experienced above-average levels of parental relationship quality and parenting quality, which in turn played a protective role vis-à-vis their cognitive and social-emotional development.
A growing literature suggests that adversity is associated with later altered brain function, particularly within the corticolimbic system that supports emotion processing and salience detection ...(e.g., amygdala, prefrontal cortex PFC). Although neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage has been shown to predict maladaptive behavioral outcomes, particularly for boys, most of the research linking adversity to corticolimbic function has focused on family‐level adversities. Moreover, although animal models and studies of normative brain development suggest that there may be sensitive periods during which adversity exerts stronger effects on corticolimbic development, little prospective evidence exists in humans. Using two low‐income samples of boys (n = 167; n = 77), Census‐derived neighborhood disadvantage during early childhood, but not adolescence, was uniquely associated with greater amygdala, but not PFC, reactivity to ambiguous neutral faces in adolescence and young adulthood. These associations remained after accounting for several family‐level adversities (e.g., low family income, harsh parenting), highlighting the independent and developmentally specific neural effects of the neighborhood context. Furthermore, in both samples, indicators measuring income and poverty status of neighbors were predictive of amygdala function, suggesting that neighborhood economic resources may be critical to brain development.
Across two prospective longitudinal studies, Census‐derived neighborhood disadvantage in early childhood was associated with greater amygdala reactivity to ambiguous facial expressions in adolescent and young adult men. These associations remained statistically‐significant after accounting for a host of family‐level adversities (i.e., low family income and maternal education, maternal depression, harsh parenting, inter‐parental conflict) during early childhood and neighborhood disadvantage during adolescence.
As nonmarital childbearing escalated in the United States over the past half century, fragile families—defined as unmarried couples with children—drew increased interest from researchers and policy ...makers. Sara McLanahan and Audrey Beck discuss four aspects of parental relationships in these families: the quality of parents' intimate relationship, the stability of that relationship, the quality of the co-parenting relationship among parents who live apart, and nonresident fathers' involvement with their child. At the time of their child's birth, half of the parents in fragile families are living together and another third are living apart but romantically involved. Despite high hopes at birth, five years later only a third of parents are still together, and new partners and new children are common, leading to high levels of instability and complexity in these families. Drawing on findings from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, McLanahan and Beck highlight a number of predictors of low relationship quality and stability in these families, including low economic resources, government policies that discourage marriage, gender distrust and acceptance of single motherhood, sex ratios that favor men, children from previous unions, and psychological factors that make it difficult for parents to maintain healthy relationships. No single factor appears to have a dominant effect. The authors next discuss two types of experiments that attempt to establish causal effects on parental relationships: those aimed at altering economic resources and those aimed at improving relationships. What can be done to strengthen parental relationships in fragile families? The authors note that although economic resources are a consistent predictor of stable relationships, researchers and policy makers lack good causal information on whether increasing fathers' employment and earnings will increase relationship quality and union stability. They also note that analysts need to know more about whether relationship quality in fragile families can be improved directly and whether doing so will increase union stability, father involvement, and co-parenting quality.
We estimated racial/ethnic differences in overweight and obesity in a national sample of 3-year-olds from urban, low-income families and assessed possible determinants of differences.
Survey, in-home ...observation, and interview data were collected at birth, 1 year, and 3 years. We used logistic regression analyses and adjusted for a range of covariates in examining overweight and obesity differentials according to race/ethnicity.
Thirty-five percent of the study children were overweight or obese. Hispanic children were twice as likely as either Black or White children to be overweight or obese. Although we controlled for a wide variety of characteristics, we were unable to explain either White-Hispanic or Black-Hispanic differences in overweight and obesity. However, birthweight, taking a bottle to bed, and mother's weight status were important predictors of children's overweight or obesity at age 3 years.
Children's problems with overweight and obesity begin as early as age 3, and Hispanic children and those with obese mothers are especially at risk.
A lack of affordable housing is a pressing issue for many low‐income American families and can lead to eviction from their homes. Housing assistance programs to address this problem include public ...housing and other assistance, including vouchers, through which a government agency offsets the cost of private market housing. This paper assesses whether the receipt of either category of assistance reduces the probability that a family will be evicted from their home in the subsequent six years. Because no randomized trial has assessed these effects, we use observational data and formalize the conditions under which a causal interpretation is warranted. Families living in public housing experience less eviction conditional on pre‐treatment variables. We argue that this evidence points toward a causal conclusion that assistance, particularly public housing, protects families from eviction.
Recent increases in births to unmarried parents, and the instability surrounding these relationships, have raised concerns about the possible health effects associated with changes in family ...structure. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study (N = 2,448), this article examines trajectories of maternal mental and physical health. We specifically focus on mothers' transitions into and out of residential relationships with a child's biological father during the first five years after birth. We find that continuously married mothers are in better mental and physical health than unmarried mothers one year after birth, but the disparity does not increase over time. This finding provides little support for the resource model. Consistent with the crisis model, exiting a marital or cohabiting union increases mental health problems and decreases self-rated health. These effects appear to be relatively short-lived, though, and they are stronger for mental health than for self-rated health. The results also suggest that union dissolution may be selective of less healthy mothers, whereas union formation does not appear to be selective of healthier mothers.
Using the Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study, we examine the association between parental major depressive and generalized anxiety disorders and child behavior problems across family types: ...married, cohabiting, involved nonresident father, and noninvolved nonresident father. Among 3-year-olds in all families, maternal anxiety/depression is associated with increased odds of anxious/ depressed, attention deficit, and oppositional defiant disorders (N = 2,120). Paternal anxiety/depression has no significant association with these problem behaviors; father's illness, however, exacerbates anxious/depressed behaviors in young children if both parents are ill and he is coresident. The findings underscore the importance of maternal mental health for child well-being and suggest that a negative interaction between parent illnesses is most likely when parents and children share the same disorder.
Data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 4,176) are used to examine family structure transitions and maternal parenting stress. Using multilevel modeling, we found that mothers ...who exit coresidential relationships with biological fathers or enter coresidential relationships with nonbiological fathers reported higher levels of parenting stress than mothers in stable coresidential relationships. Mothers who enter coresidential relationships with biological fathers reported lower levels of parenting stress than mothers who remain single. Mothers' resources, especially their relationships with biological fathers, accounted for most of the associations between transitions and parenting stress, with posttransition resources being more important than pretransition resources. Mothers with high levels of education were less affected by transitions than mothers with less education.
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