Pamela Morris

Does money really matter? Estimating impacts of family income on young children's achievement with data from random-assignment experiments.

Social scientists do not agree on the size and nature of the causal impacts of parental income on childrens achievement. We revisit this issue using a set of welfare and antipoverty experiments conducted in the 1990s. We utilize an instrumental variables strategy to leverage the variation in income and achievement that arises from random assignment to the treatment group to estimate the causal effect of income on child achievement. Our estimates suggest that a

Allostasis and the human brain: Integrating models of stress from the social and life sciences.

1,000 increase in annual income increases young childrens achievement by 5%-6% of a standard deviation. As such, our results suggest that family income has a policy-relevant, positive impact on the eventual school achievement of preschool children.

Child Well-Being in an Era of Welfare Reform: The Sensitivity of Transitions in Development to Policy Change

We draw on the theory of allostasis to develop an integrative model of the current stress process that highlights the brain as a dynamically adapting interface between the changing environment and the biological self. We review evidence that the core emotional regions of the brain constitute the primary mediator of the well-established association between stress and health, as well as the neural focus of wear and tear due to ongoing adaptation. This mediation, in turn, allows us to model the interplay over time between context, current stressor exposure, internal regulation of bodily processes, and health outcomes. We illustrate how this approach facilitates the integration of current findings in human neuroscience and genetics with key constructs from stress models from the social and life sciences, with implications for future research and the design of interventions targeting individuals at risk.

Allostasis and the developing human brain: Explicit consideration of implicit models

This study examined the age-specific pattern of effects of welfare policies on child achievement. Drawing from 7 random-assignment welfare and antipoverty evaluations that provided more than 30,000 observations of childrens achievement, this study found that times of developmental transition are the only periods sensitive to the changes in families brought about by these policies. More specifically, small positive effects of welfare and antipoverty policies were found for children making the transition into middle childhood, and small negative effects of these same policies were found for children making the transition out of middle childhood and into early adolescence. Effects were robust across various program groupings and could not be attributed to family characteristics that differ for children of different ages. This research informs the understanding of how changes in employment and income for low-income parents affect development across childhood.

How Welfare Policies Affect Child and Adolescent Achievement

We previously used the theory of allostasis as the foundation for a model of the current stress process. This work highlighted the core emotional systems of the brain as the central mediator of the relationship between stress and health. In this paper, we extend this theoretical approach to consider the role of developmental timing. In doing so, we note that there are strong implicit models that underlie current developmental stress research in the social and life sciences. We endeavor to illustrate these models explicitly as we review the evidence behind each one and discuss their implications. We then extend these models to reflect recent findings from research in life span human neuroscience. The result is a new set of developmental allostatic models that provide fodder for future empirical research, as well as novel perspectives on intervention.

Findings from the Self-Sufficiency Project: Effects on children and adolescents of a program that increased employment and income

Recent research based on random-assignment experiments has found that the effects of welfare and employment policies appear to vary by children’s developmental stage. Programs that increase parents’ employment and income have been found to have either neutral or positive effects for preschool and early-school-age children in poverty, depending on the policy approach utilized (Pamela Morris et al., 2001). At the same time, negative effects have been observed for adolescent children (Lisa Gennetian et al., 2002), and the limited research on very young children has shown neutral effects (Morris and Charles Michalopoulos, 2000). We pool data on over 30,000 achievement reports for children in families enrolled in 14 different random-assignment welfare and work programs to examine how the impacts of policies aimed at increasing parents’ employment and their income vary across childhood. Our efforts extend past work by including more programs, using longer-run follow-up data from some of the programs that had been included in prior studies, and pooling micro-level data rather than applying meta-analytic techniques to study-wide impact estimates. Both economic and psychological theories suggest that changes in parents’ economic and employment circumstances may affect children’s development, although each emphasizes a different pathway of influence (Gary S. Becker, 1981; James S. Coleman, 1988; Vonnie McLoyd, 1998). But children in differing developmental periods may respond differently to the same changes in employment on the part of their parents. For example, employment in the first year of a child’s life may be associated with more negative child outcomes (Jeanne BrooksGunn et al., 2002), especially if it involves many hours of work (Elizabeth Harvey, 1999) or is associated with long hours in nonmaternal care (Michael Lamb, 1998; McLoyd, 1998). After-school arrangements are associated with positive outcomes for both pre-adolescent and adolescent children, keeping them in structured care and away from peers (Gregory S. Pettit et al., 1999; Jill K. Posner and Deborah Lowe Vandell, 1999). At the same time, adolescents may have difficulties if left alone after school and into the evening hours as mothers take on off-hour and shift work; maternal employment has been found to be associated with reduced parental supervision and increased adolescent delinquency among low-income families (Robert J. Sampson and John H. Laub, 1994). Finally, adolescent children may also be asked to take on greater household responsibilities when their single mothers move into employment, which may result in negative academic performance. Since some of the welfare programs in our pooled data provided financial incentives and boosted not only employment, but also family income, we are able to ascertain whether income-augmenting programs benefit children more than programs that merely increase employment. Note, however, that none of our studies randomly allocated participants into either a financial incentive or a nonfinancial incentive program, so our comparison of impacts between these two types of programs is nonexperimental. Experimental research to date suggests that programs that increase both parents’ employment and their income produce positive effects for preschool and early-school-age children * Clark-Kaufman and Duncan: Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208 (e-mail: beth-clark@northwestern.edu, greg-duncan@ northwestern.edu). Morris: Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, 16 East 34th Street, New York, NY 10016 (email: pamela_morris@mdrc.org). We are grateful for financial support from the Family and Child Well-being Research Network of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U01 HD30947-06) for supporting Duncan and Clark-Kaufman. This paper is part of Next Generation, a project led by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) that examines the effects of welfare, antipoverty, and employment policies on children and families. Funding for this project was provided by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. We thank the funders of these studies and partners in evaluating these programs for access to the data.

The Role of Classroom-Level Child Behavior Problems in Predicting Preschool Teacher Stress and Classroom Emotional Climate

Abstract This paper examines the effects on children of an antipoverty employment program for Canadian welfare recipients called the Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP). The SSP made work pay better than welfare by offering a temporary, but generous, earnings supplement to single parents who left welfare for full-time employment. The SSP was tested using a rigorous random assignment research design. While the SSP was found to increase employment and income for parents of children in every age group, the effects of the program on the children themselves differed with their age. For very young children, the SSP had no effect on childrens outcomes. For children in the middle childhood period at follow-up, the SSP increased childrens cognitive functioning and health outcomes, but had no benefits on their social behavior. For adolescents, the SSP increased minor delinquency and substance use. The results are discussed in terms of their contribution to research and policy.

Intrayear Household Income Dynamics and Adolescent School Behavior

Research Findings: Despite the abundance of research suggesting that preschool classroom quality influences childrens social-emotional development, the equally important and related question of how characteristics of children enrolled in a classroom influence classroom quality has rarely been addressed. The current article focuses on this question while also considering teacher stress as a mediator of the relationship between child behavior problems and classroom emotional climate. Data came from 2 low-income samples. Ordinary least squares regression revealed that higher levels of child externalizing behavior problems in the fall predicted higher teacher stress in the spring. Teacher stress was nonlinearly related to classroom emotional climate in the spring: Moderate levels of teacher stress were associated with higher (i.e., more positive) classroom emotional climates, and low and high levels of teacher stress were associated with lower classroom emotional climates. Contrary to expectations, higher levels of child externalizing behavior problems were related to higher classroom emotional climates. There was no evidence that teacher stress mediated this relationship. Practice or Policy: These results are discussed in terms of strategies to reduce the disruptive influence of child behavior problems on the classroom emotional climate as well as strategies to limit high levels of preschool teacher stress.

Welfare Policies and Very Young Children: Experimental Data on Stage–Environment Fit

Economic life for most American households is quite dynamic. Such income instability is an understudied aspect of households’ economic contexts that may have distinct consequences for children. We examine the empirical relationship between household income instability, as measured by intrayear income change, and adolescent school behavior outcomes using a nationally representative sample of households with adolescents from the Survey of Income and Program Participation 2004 panel. We find an unfavorable relationship between income instability and adolescent school behaviors after controlling for income level and a large set of child and family characteristics. Income instability is associated with a lower likelihood of adolescents being highly engaged in school across the income spectrum and predicts adolescent expulsions and suspensions, particularly among low-income, older, and racial minority adolescents.

Indicators and Policy Decisions: The Important Role of Experimental Studies

The authors examined the effects of welfare programs that increased maternal employment and family income on the development of very young children using data from 5 random-assignment experiments. The children were 6 months to 3 years old when their mothers entered the programs; cognitive and behavioral outcomes were measured 2-5 years later. While there were no overall program impacts, positive or negative, on the development of children in this age group, there was a pair of domain- and age-specific effects: The programs decreased positive social behavior among 1-year-olds and increased school achievement among 2-year-olds. After exploring several explanations for these results, the authors suggest that the contextual changes engendered by the programs, including childrens exposure to center-based child care, interacted differentially with specific developmental transitions.