Successful childrearing in diverse neighborhood environments

About this book

Central to many theories of the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status is parents' utilization of successful childrearing techniques. That is, certain youth achieve greater socioeconomic success in adulthood because of the ways that their parents reared them at home and in their communities. It is tempting to conceive of childrearing as an individual-level phenomenon, yet it is important to recognize that childrearing is influenced by the contexts in which parents attempt to raise their children, namely the contexts of their employment situations and neighborhood conditions. Much research on work and childrearing focuses on characteristics of parent's jobs, such as occupational status, degree of economic strain, or the various types of benefits attendant to different jobs. Yet, parents' employment situations change over time, so it is important to extend the work and childrearing literature to consider features of parents' employment trajectories, namely the stability and security of their employment situations. In this dissertation, I examine whether and how the stability and security of parents' employment trajectories relates to their utilization of effective childrearing techniques across a variety of levels, at the neighborhood-level, at the interface between home and community, and inside the home. I use data from three different datasets, the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics-Child Development Supplement, and the Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three City Study to examine these issues. Using a variety of modeling techniques, including Hierarchical Linear Modeling, OLS regression, mediation analyses, and propensity score matching techniques, I find that: (a) greater levels of stable, secure employment at the community level is related to greater levels of social control of youth, even after accounting for a variety of competing explanations; (b) secure, stable employment seems to promote parents' ability to engage in certain positive family management strategies across diverse neighborhood conditions, even after conditioning on a rich array of selection factors; and (c) stable and secure employment profiles among low-income primarily single mothers is related to the provision of more consistent family routines within the home, even after controlling for a rich array of potentially confounding factors.