Maternal Education at Birth and Youth Breakfast Consumption at Age 15: Blacks’ Diminished Returns

Abstract

Background: Based on the Marginalization-related Diminished Returns (MDRs) framework, high socioeconomic status (SES) such as parental education shows weaker effects for Blacks than Whites. For example, high SES Black individuals report a high level of depression, anxiety, suicide, chronic disease, smoking, and mortality. Limited knowledge exists on MDRs of parental education on dietary behavior. Aims: Built on the MDRs framework, we tested the hypothesis of whether the effect of parental education on eating breakfast differs for Black compared to White families. We hypothesized that there is an association between mothers’ educational attainment and eating breakfast and compared Blacks and Whites for the effect of mothers’ educational attainment on the frequency of eating breakfast. Methods: The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study is a 15-year follow up study of a random sample of births in cities larger than 200,000 population. The predictor was parental education at birth. The outcome was the frequency of eating breakfast at age 15. Linear regression was used for data analysis. Results: Maternal educational attainment at birth was positively associated with youth frequency of eating breakfast among Whites, not Blacks. We also found a significant interaction between maternal educational attainment at birth and race, suggesting that the association between maternal education and youth frequency of eating breakfast at age 15 was weaker for Black than White families. Conclusions: Diminished returns of maternal educational attainment on healthy youth diet may contribute to the racial disparities in poor health of high SES Black families. That is, a smaller protective effect of maternal education on changing health behaviors for Black than White youth may be one of the mechanisms by which health is worse than expected in high SES Black families. The health disparities are not only due to racial differences in SES but also the diminishing returns of socioeconomic status indicators such as education for racial minorities. Research should study contextual and structural factors that reduce Black families’ ability to mobilize their human capital and secure health outcomes in urban settings.

American Children’s Screen Time: Diminished Returns of Household Income in Black Families

“…This is in line with what is already established for the effects of MDRs of many economic resources, such as family income, on impulsivity [24], reward responsiveness [42], inhibitory control [43], attention [44], and ADHD [27] for black children compared with white children. Similar MDRs were also reported for the effects of family SES indicators, such as parental education, household income, and marital status, on behavioral risks such as substance use [23], diet [28], exercise [29], anxiety [20], depression [21], and suicide [22]. These are all diminishing returns of economic resources for black youths when compared with white youths [16,[45][46][47].…”

“…While there is an extensive body of research documenting MDRs of parental education [ 23 ], family income [ 24 , 25 ], and marital status [ 26 ] on a wide range of developmental, health, emotional, and behavioral outcomes [ 21 , 23 – 25 ], we are not aware of any previous studies that test MDRs of a family’s SES on children’s screen time. We know that a high SES shows weaker effects on depression [ 21 ], anxiety [ 20 ], impulsivity [ 24 ], grade point average (GPA) [ 23 ], attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) [ 27 ], diet [ 28 ], exercise [ 29 ], sleep [ 30 ], substance use [ 23 ], obesity [ 31 ], and chronic disease [ 23 ] for black children than white children. However, there is more to be learned about the relevance of MDRs of the SES indicators to screen time for black children.…”

Parental Educational Attainment, the Superior Temporal Cortical Surface Area, and Reading Ability among American Children: A Test of Marginalization-Related Diminished Returns

“…In addition to the ABCD study data [ 102 ], similar MDRs are shown in several national studies, such as the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) [ 69 , 108 , 109 , 110 , 111 ], Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) [ 47 , 112 , 113 , 114 ], Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) [ 115 ], Monitoring the Future (MTF) [ 53 ], and National Survey of American Life (NSAL) [ 50 ], all showing weaker effects of SES indicators on outcomes for black children compared to white children. For example, in the PATH data, SES effects on future tobacco use [ 47 ], in the FFCWS study, SES effects on ADHD, impulsivity, obesity, and self-rated health [ 69 , 108 , 109 , 110 , 111 ], in ELS, SES effects on school quality [ 115 ], and in MTF, SES effects on school performance were all weaker for black than white children [ 53 ].…”

Top-Down Inference in the Auditory System: Potential Roles for Corticofugal Projections

“…Virtually all current models that describe the use of top-down modulation to facilitate auditory processing have focused on intracortical projections [e.g., from the frontal cortex to auditory cortex or from secondary auditory cortical fields to the primary auditory cortex (Zekveld et al, 2006;Hannemann et al, 2007;Sohoglu et al, 2012;Chennu et al, 2013Chennu et al, , 2016Hofmann-Shen et al, 2020)]. What is often left out of the discussion, however, are the massive and heterogeneous projections emanating from the auditory cortex that target virtually every level of the subcortical auditory system (herein ''corticofugal projections'') and, through cascading projections, impacting the most peripheral component: the cochlea (Xiao and Suga, 2002;León et al, 2012;Dragicevic et al, 2015;Jäger and Kössl, 2016).…”