Income Inequality and Class Divides in Parental Investments

Schneider, Daniel; Hastings, Orestes P.; LaBriola, Joe

doi:10.31235/osf.io/7gjdc

Cited by 66 publications

(107 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Emotionally, adults can become abusive of their children (Wood et al 2012) or neglect them (Straus, Gelles, and Steinmetz 1980). Materially, responding to a reduction in family income, parents cut expenses for food (Conklin et al 2018;Nandy, Daoud, and Gordon 2016;Ponce et al 2017), clothing, medical care, and education (Puaca and Daoud 2011;Schneider, Hastings, and LaBriola 2018).…”

Section: Micro Moderators: Families' Capabilities To Protect Their Chmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating Treatment Heterogeneity of International Monetary Fund Programs on Child Poverty with Generalized Random Forest

Daoud¹,

Johansson²

2019

Preprint

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A flourishing group of scholars of family sociology study how macroeconomic shockwaves propagate via households dynamics and landing a blow on children’s living conditions; simultaneously, scholars of political economy unravel impacts of such shockwaves on population outcomes. Since these two strands of literature have evolved independently, little is know about the relative importance of societal and family features moderating this impact on children’s material living conditions. In this article, we synthesize insights from these two strands by examining the effect of economic austerity following International Monetary Fund programs—a type of economic shock—on child poverty across a sample representative of about half the world’s population of mainly the Global South. This article addresses the following fundamental sociological questions: to what extent do the pathways of economic austerity propagate through families’ living conditions and societies’ structural and political characteristics. To capture these multiple non-linear heterogeneous relationships between macro and micro traits, we deploy machine learning in the service of policy evaluation. First, our analysis identifies an adverse average treatment effect (ATE) following the implementation of IMF programs on children’s probability of falling into poverty: 0.14, 95% CI 0.03- 0.24. Second, our algorithms identify substantial impact heterogeneity distributed about this ATE. Macro constellation moderate about half of the impact variation on children, and families’ capabilities moderate the other half of this variation. We named this finding the 50-50 impact-moderation rule of thumb. Our algorithm identified family wealth closely followed by governments’ education spending as the critical moderating factors. IMF program affects children residing in the middle of the social stratification more than compared to their peers residing in both the top and bottom of this stratification; for those children residing in societies that have selected into IMF programs and have historically spent most on education, are at a higher risk of falling into poverty. These findings identify the value of combining family sociology and political economy perspectives. Scholars will likely cross-fertilize this research further by testing this 50-50 rule of thumb to other types of economic shocks.

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Section: Micro Moderators: Families' Capabilities To Protect Their Chmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating Treatment Heterogeneity of International Monetary Fund Programs on Child Poverty with Generalized Random Forest

Daoud¹,

Johansson²

2019

Preprint

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“…Charting childcare time, Ramey and Ramey (2010) find that the gap between college-educated and less-educated mothers widened substantially after the mid-1990s. Schneider et al (2018) also find evidence of widening divides between households in the top income decile and lower-income households in terms of childcare time, with fathers of high-income households in particular appearing to increase their childcare time relative to other fathers since 2000. Though much research on parental childcare time focuses on a broader conceptualization of childcare than play and/or educational activities, and on childcare performed for all and not just young children, similar socioeconomic gaps in developmental childcare time can be seen for households with young children (Kalil et al 2012;Hsin and Felfe 2014;Altintas 2016;Vinpal and Gershenson 2017).…”

Section: Class Gaps In Parental Childcare Timementioning

confidence: 84%

“…Parental socioeconomic class strongly influences parental childcare time, with parents in higherincome households (Ramey and Ramey 2010;Schneider et al 2018) and with higher levels of education (Ramey and Ramey 2010;Guryan et al 2008;Kalil et al 2012) performing more childcare. Further, these class gaps in maternal and paternal investments of time by class appear to have widened in recent years.…”

Section: Class Gaps In Parental Childcare Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Class Inequality in Parental Childcare Time: Evidence from Synthetic Couples in the ATUS

LaBriola¹,

Schneider²

2019

Preprint

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The time that parents spend teaching and playing with their young children has important consequences for later life achievement and attainment. Previous research suggests that there are significant class inequalities in how much time parents devote to this kind of developmental childcare in the United States. Yet, due in part to data limitations, prior research has not accounted for how class inequalities in family structure, assortative mating, and specialization between partners may exacerbate or ameliorate these gaps. We match parental respondents within the American Time Use Survey to generate synthetic parental dyads, which we use to estimate, in turn, the contributions of family structure, assortative mating, and specialization to class gaps in parental time spent in developmental care of children aged 0-6. We find some evidence that accounting for class differences in family structure widens income gaps in total parental time in developmental childcare of young children. Further, we show that assortative mating of parents further contributes to educational gaps in developmental childcare, while specialization between partners does not offset these wider class divides. While the net effect of these three processes on income-based gaps in childcare time is more modest, accounting for these three processes more than doubles education-based gaps in total parental developmental childcare as compared to maternal time alone. Our findings from this novel empirical approach provide a more holistic view of the extent and sources of inequality in parental time investments in young children’s cognitive and social development.

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“…Some evidence suggests that in the US context, the educational gap in childcare has been increasing over time (Altintas, 2016;Putnam, 2016;Sani & Treas, 2016). Childcare is an important component of social stratification and inequality (Fiorini & Keane, 2014;Fomby & Musick, 2018;Schneider, Hastings, & LaBriola, 2018). Childcare, and more generally parent-child interactions, can have long-lasting consequences for a child's life course (Bono, Francesconi, Kelly, & Sacker, 2016;Hsin & Felfe, 2014;Kalil & Mayer, 2016;Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009).…”

Section: The Social Stratification Of Timementioning

confidence: 99%

The social stratification of time use patterns

Vagni

2020

British Journal of Sociology

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Time use is both a cause of social inequality and a consequence of social inequality. However, how social class stratifies time use patterns is seldom studied. In this paper, I describe the time use patterns in the years 1983 and 2015 by social class, and gender in the British context. Using sequence analysis methods, I show how the diversity of time use patterns in British society is socially stratified. I find that 13 clusters capture the heterogeneity of time use patterns and that these clusters are associated with social class, gender, and day of the week. These clusters capture patterns of paid and unpaid work schedules, as well as leisure patterns. The results show that men have experienced a reduction of the standard Monday to Friday 8‐hr working day, while women have experienced a general increase in this type of schedule. On the other hand, patterns of domestic working days have reduced for women and increased for men. Important differences exist in paid and unpaid work patterns between social classes. Working‐class women have experienced an important increase in shift work on weekends. They are also much more likely to be doing unpaid work on weekdays compared to upper‐class and middle‐class women. Working‐class men are more likely to experience non‐working days and leisure days on both weekdays and weekends and are more likely to be doing shift work. They are also more often doing unpaid work on weekdays compared to men in upper‐class households. Patterns of childcare indicate that all families have increased their childcare time. Men in upper‐class households in particular have experienced an important growth in childcare time between 1983 and 2015. I conclude by discussing how time use can further our understanding of social stratification.

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Income Inequality and Class Divides in Parental Investments

Cited by 66 publications

References 40 publications

Estimating Treatment Heterogeneity of International Monetary Fund Programs on Child Poverty with Generalized Random Forest

Estimating Treatment Heterogeneity of International Monetary Fund Programs on Child Poverty with Generalized Random Forest

Class Inequality in Parental Childcare Time: Evidence from Synthetic Couples in the ATUS

The social stratification of time use patterns

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