Children and Socioeconomic Status

Abstract

Connections between children's family socioeconomic position (SES), their early experiences, and later life outcomes are both strong and complicated. This chapter guides readers through the theoretical perspectives and empirical studies linking family SES to children's development, and summarizes which areas are well understood and which need more research. The chapter begins by reviewing how scholars define and measure family SES and focuses on its three most common indicators: income and poverty, parental education, and parental occupation. In the next section, demographic and economic trends in SES components are reviewed, with specific attention devoted to trends in inequality. Next, the three main theoretical approaches for explaining how SES affects child development are summarized: the family and environmental stress perspective, the resource and investment perspective, and cultural perspectives. We then describe methodological challenges that researchers face when trying to estimate causal associations between SES and child development and review the empirical literature. Finally, we discuss the implications of the research findings for policy and suggest key unanswered theoretical and empirical questions regarding how household SES affects children and families.

Moving Beyond Correlations in Assessing the Consequences of Poverty

“…Portions of this article were adapted from a more general review of socioeconomic status that the authors wrote for the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science (Duncan et al 2015) and from Duncan et al (2014).…”

Human Infancy...and the Rest of the Lifespan

“…2009); likewise, immune-mediated chronic diseases play a role in associations between poverty in the prenatal year through age 2 (but not between ages 3 and 5 years or between ages 6 and 15 years) and limitations on activities of daily living, hypertension, and arthritis and on adult productivity between ages 30 and 41 (Ziol-Guest et al 2012). Duncan et al (2015) learned that family income in the period age 0 to 2 years had larger beneficial effects on adolescents’ completed schooling and adults’ college attendance than later family income. Generally speaking, economic disadvantage in very early childhood is linked to worse overall health status and higher rates of mortality in adulthood (Case, Fertig, & Paxson 2005), and early family indigence is linked to heightened risk for several chronic diseases in adulthood (Johnson & Schoeni 2007 as reported in Duncan et al 2015): By age 50, individuals who experienced poverty in early childhood were 46% more likely to have asthma, 75% more likely to be diagnosed with hypertension, 83% more likely to have been diagnosed with diabetes, 2.25 times more likely to have experienced a stroke or heart attack, and 40% more likely to have been diagnosed with heart disease, in comparison to individuals whose family incomes were 200% of the poverty line or greater.…”

Family poverty and neighborhood poverty: Links with children's school readiness before and after the Great Recession

“…A large body of research has focused on understanding poverty as a key determinant of children’s wellbeing (Duncan, Magnuson & Votruba-Drzal, 2015; Yoshikawa, Aber, & Beardslee, 2012). Compared with their more affluent peers, poor children have lower levels of school achievement and attainment, worse health, and are rated by teachers and parents as having worse classroom behaviors (Duncan et al, 2015).…”

“…Compared with their more affluent peers, poor children have lower levels of school achievement and attainment, worse health, and are rated by teachers and parents as having worse classroom behaviors (Duncan et al, 2015). In studies of poverty, family-level economic resources, rather than community or neighborhood resources, are often privileged as the key determinants.…”