Ecological Instability and Children’s Classroom Behavior in Kindergarten

Abstract

We engage the concept of ecological instability to assess whether exposure to frequent change in multiple contexts during early childhood is associated with teacher reports of students’ overall behavior, externalizing behavior, and approach to learning during kindergarten. We operationalize multiple dimensions of children’s exposure to repeated change, including the frequency, concurrency, chronicity, timing, and type of changes children experience in a nationally-representative longitudinal cohort of U.S.-born children (Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, N~4,750). We focus on early childhood, a period when there is substantial flux in children’s family and neighborhood contexts. Predicted behavior scores differ by approximately one-fifth of a standard deviation for children who experienced high or chronic exposure to ecological change compared to those who experienced little or no change. These findings emphasize the distinctiveness of multi-domain ecological instability as a risk factor for healthy development that should be conceptualized differently from the broader concept of normative levels of change in early childhood environments.

Divorce, Repartnering, and Stepfamilies: A Decade in Review

“…An extensive body of work makes it clear that the more family structure transitions children face, the lower their level of well‐being on average (for recent reviews, see Cavanagh & Fomby, ; Hadfield, Amos, Ungar, Gosselin, & Ganong, ). This pattern holds across multiple domains of well‐being, including problem behavior (e.g., Cooper, Osborne, Beck, & McLanahan, ; Fomby & Mollborn, ; Fomby & Sennott, ; Mitchell et al, ), health (Bzostek & Beck, ; Smith, Crosnoe, & Cavanagh, ), and emotional well‐being (e.g., Bzostek & Berger, ; Lee & McLanahan, ), as well as socioeconomic attainment and relationship stability in adulthood (e.g., Amato & Patterson, ; Bloome, ; Fomby, ; Fomby & Bosick, ). A range of explanations have been offered for the association between family instability and reduced offspring well‐being—generally focusing on changes in economic resources, parenting, and emotional stress—but empirical support for such mechanisms remains surprisingly modest (Cavanagh & Fomby, ).…”

Family structure effects on U.S. children’s well-being? Re-examining the family instability hypothesis

“…On the opposite, lack of wealth or low socio-occupational attaintment may decrease the stability of familiy trajectories among those who had little to gain from marriage to begin with, and therefore little to lose from its dissolution. While at the same time wealth and socio-occupational class have been shown to be main determinants of children's well-being (Hällsten and Pfeffer (2017) and Downey and Condron (2016); and for other contextual factors see Fomby and Mollborn (2017)), which makes these and other unobserved variables confounders in the association between changes in family structure and children's well-being.…”

Untitled

“…From an ecological perspective of the same phenomenon, we can say that instability per se is a danger to development for the young child; the instability of the residential environment, changes in the mother's employment, changes in the family structure (e.g. the birth of a sibling or the death of a cohabiting grandparent), or changes in the mother's relationship status are coequal dimensions of this environmental instability (see Fomby -Mollborn 2017).…”