Paula Fomby

Family Instability, School Context, and the Academic Careers of Adolescents

An emerging literature suggests that the increasingly complex family histories of American children are linked with multiple domains of adolescent development. Much of this scholarship focuses on associations at the individual level. Here, the authors consider whether key dimensions of the school context, specifically the aggregate level of family instability and the academic press within schools, moderate the link between family instability and young people’s course-taking patterns in mathematics in high school. Using the school-based design and the retrospective reports of family structure in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the linked academic transcript data in the Adolescent Health and Achievement Study (n = 6,545), the authors find that students from unstable families do more poorly when they attend schools with a high proportion of academically oriented students. The prevalence of family instability in a school does not moderate the individual experience of family instability in predicting course-taking patterns.

Health lifestyles in early childhood.

This study integrates two important developments, the concept of health lifestyles (which has focused on adults and adolescents) and the increased attention to early childhood. We introduce the concept of childrens health lifestyles, identifying differences from adult health lifestyles and articulating intergenerational transmission and socialization processes shaping childrens health lifestyles. Using the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (2001-2007; N ≈ 6,150), latent class analyses identify predominant health lifestyles among U.S. preschoolers. Five distinct empirical patterns representing health lifestyles emerge, two capturing low and medium levels of overall risk across domains and three capturing domain-specific risks. Social background predicts childrens health lifestyles, but lower household resources often explain these relationships. Across kindergarten measures of cognition, behavior, and health, preschool health lifestyles predict childrens development even after controlling for social disadvantage and concurrent household resources. Further research on health lifestyles throughout childhood is warranted.

How Resource Dynamics Explain Accumulating Developmental and Health Disparities for Teen Parents’ Children

This study examines the puzzle of disparities experienced by U.S. teen parents’ young children, whose health and development increasingly lag behind those of peers while their parents are simultaneously experiencing socioeconomic improvements. Using the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (2001–2007; N ≈ 8,600), we assess four dynamic patterns in socioeconomic resources that might account for these growing developmental and health disparities throughout early childhood and then test them in multilevel growth curve models. Persistently low socioeconomic resources constituted the strongest explanation, given that consistently low income, maternal education, and assets fully or partially account for growth in cognitive, behavioral, and health disparities experienced by teen parents’ children from infancy through kindergarten. That is, although teen parents gained socioeconomic resources over time, those resources remained relatively low, and the duration of exposure to limited resources explains observed growing disparities. Results suggest that policy interventions addressing the time dynamics of low socioeconomic resources in a household, in terms of both duration and developmental timing, are promising for reducing disparities experienced by teen parents’ children.

Public Assistance Use among U.S.-Born Children of Immigrants

U.S.-born children of immigrants may be less likely to receive some social services than are children of native-born parents if foreign-born parents who are themselves ineligible are less likely to apply on their childrens behalf. We use retrospective data from a sample of about 2,400 low-income households in three U.S. cities to determine whether children with foreign-born caregivers are less likely than children with native-born caregivers to receive benefits from any of five programs over a two-year period: TANF, SSI, Food Stamps, Medicaid, and WIC. The most significant disparities between children of citizen and noncitizen caregivers are in TANF and food stamp use.

Family Instability, Multipartner Fertility, and Behavior in Middle Childhood

Two concepts capture the dynamic and complex nature of contemporary family structure: family instability and multipartner fertility. Although these circumstances are likely to co-occur, their respective literatures have proceeded largely independently. We used data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N=3,062) to consider these dimensions of dynamic family structure together, asking whether they independently predict childrens behavior problems at age 9. Frequent family instability was consistently predictive of higher predicted levels of behavior problems for children born to unmarried mothers, an association largely attenuated by factors related to family stress. Multipartner fertility was robustly related to self-reported delinquency and teacher-reported behavior problems among children born to married mothers.

Family Complexity, Siblings, and Children's Aggressive Behavior at School Entry.

As family structure in the United States has become increasingly dynamic and complex, children have become more likely to reside with step- or half-siblings through a variety of pathways. When these pathways are accounted for, more than one in six U.S. children live with a step- or half-sibling at age 4. We use data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (N ~ 6,550) to assess the independent and joint influences of residing with a single parent or stepparent and with step- or half-siblings on children’s aggressive behavior at school entry. The influences of parents’ union status and complex sibship status on aggressive behavior are independent. Family resources partially explain the association between residing with an unpartnered mother and aggressive behavior regardless of sibship status. However, the resource hypothesis does not explain the association of complex sibship with aggressive behavior.

Family instability and school readiness in the United Kingdom

I investigate the prevalence of family instability in the United Kingdom and its association with childrens school readiness at age 5. Data are from three sweeps of the Millennium Cohort Study (2001–2007). Family instability is measured by mothers self-report of union status changes since her childs birth. Outcome measures include mother assessments of child behavior and standardized scores on cognitive assessments. Maternal education and household income explained the association of family instability with childrens emotional behavior and nonverbal ability, but conduct problems and verbal ability remained associated with family instability after accounting for explanatory factors. Compared to children born to married parents, the verbal ability of children born to cohabiting parents was less affected by later family structure change.

Motherhood in Complex Families

Families formed through multipartner fertility, where children with a common biological mother were conceived by different biological fathers, represent a growing share of all families in the United States. Using data from four waves of the Fragile Families Child and Wellbeing Study (N = 3,366), I find that women who have engaged in multipartner fertility are more likely to experience parenting stress and depression compared with mothers whose children share the same biological father. Mothers’ depression is explained in the short term by poor relationship quality with the father of her prior children and in the longer term by indicators of boundary ambiguity in complex families. Mothers’ parenting stress was only weakly explained by variation in perceived kin support, father involvement, or boundary ambiguity.

Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to Conduct Life Course Health Development Analysis

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is a nationally representative, longitudinal study of families in the USA that began in 1968. It is the longest-running household panel survey in the world. As of 2015, a total of 39 waves of data have been collected over 47 years. The study currently covers nearly 10,000 families and 25,000 individuals and has achieved reinterview response rates of 96–98% in virtually every wave. PSID interviews collect information on a wide range of economic, demographic, social, and health topics. The study has a genealogical design, and adult children of respondents who split off from their parents to form their own households are recruited into the study. In recent years, PSID has expanded its collection of data on children and young adults through the Child Development Supplement and Transition into Adulthood Supplement, which provide important opportunities to study the early life course. PSID data support research on poverty dynamics and its consequences for individual and family well-being, the intergenerational transmission of human and social capital and health status, and the family and contextual processes surrounding early human capital formation. PSID data and documentation are freely and publicly available on the Internet through the PSID Data Center. Restricted data with geocoded information and administrative data linkages are also available to authorized users under contract. PSID is a unique resource for answering many questions in life course health development research that can be answered with no other data source.

Ecological Instability and Children’s Classroom Behavior in Kindergarten

We engage the concept of ecological instability to assess whether children’s exposure to frequent change in multiple contexts 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 types 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 of 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 with those who experienced little or no change. These findings emphasize the distinctiveness of multidomain 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.