Reprinted from the Texas Population Research Center

Healthy cognitive function allows older adults to better maintain their independence and economic productivity. Due to the rapid increase of the population of older adults in the United States and the lack of effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, it is important to identify factors that promote cognitive health prior to late life.

A sense of neighborhood cohesion – the perceived degree of trust, reciprocity, and sense of belonging among members of a community – may be one of those factors that can promote cognitive health and delay the onset of cognitive decline. Indeed, adults’ more favorable perceptions of their current neighborhoods have been related to positive cognitive health outcomes, and shown to be protective against cognitive decline.

Less is known, however, about the potential enduring effects of neighborhood cohesion from earlier stages in a person’s life course. Cognitive functioning in midlife and older adulthood is partly determined by early-life exposures. These early-life experiences and exposures can accumulate and contribute to well-being and better health outcomes in later life.

Engaging in mentally stimulating activities may protect people against cognitive impairment by building stocks of coping strategies that help stave off or protect against brain diseases. Research has found that structural features of a neighborhood provide important sources of cognitive reserve. These features include public infrastructure, such as sidewalks, and amenities such as parks, libraries and access to cafes and other walkable destinations.

A sense of neighborhood cohesion may be beneficial for cognitive health because it provides greater opportunities for physical activity, positive social interactions, and healthy lifestyle behaviors in both childhood and adulthood. On the other hand, people who perceive their neighborhoods as less cohesive tend to experience greater loneliness, isolation, and increased symptoms of depressive and anxiety symptoms, which are well-documented risk factors for cognitive decline and impairment in midlife and late life.

This study, using data from a large sample of U.S. adults, investigated the impact on cognitive aging of perceived neighborhood cohesion at different life stages—childhood, young adulthood, early midlife, and late midlife/late adulthood.

Key Findings

• Greater perceived neighborhood cohesion in childhood (measured at age 10) and at the time of the baseline interview (measured among people ranging in age from 51 to 89, or among people from late midlife through late adulthood) each predicted higher cognitive function at the time of the baseline interview (see figure).
• Neighborhood cohesion at young adulthood (age at first full-time job) and early midlife (age 40) were not significantly associated with cognitive function at the later ages (age 51-89).
• No associations were found between any of the neighborhood cohesion variables in any life stage and with the rate of change in cognitive function.

Policy Implications

Neighborhood contexts are critical yet understudied social determinants of cognitive health. Greater perceptions of neighborhood cohesion in both early and later life can promote better cognitive function in the period spanning late midlife to late adulthood.

Declines in cognitive function can begin prior to old age. Therefore, policies to enhance people’s sense of belonging and trust in their neighborhoods across the life course can be important strategies through which to promote healthy cognitive aging. These policies could include improving the built environment, for example, adding sidewalks and walking paths; and adding amenities, such as parks and community or recreation centers. These additions to the community would provide more opportunities for physical activity, positive social interactions, and healthy lifestyle choices.

Data and Methods

This study used data from up to 10 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (1998–2016), an ongoing biennial longitudinal panel study of over 23,000 households in the United States, comprised of a nationally representative sample of adults over age 50. The authors used data from participants who were aged 51-89 at the time of their first interview (baseline).

Respondents provided ratings of their perceptions of neighborhood cohesion at childhood (age 10), young adulthood (age at the first full-time job), early midlife (age 40), and concurrently at the time of the interview (ages covering late midlife through late adulthood). To measure neighborhood cohesion at age 40 and below, participants were asked to rate how much they felt a part of the area within a mile of their home on a scale of 1 (I felt I didn’t belong in this area) to 7 (I really felt part of this area). To measure how participants felt about their current neighborhood, they were asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 7, four statements regarding the area within a mile of their home: I really feel part of the area/I feel that I don’t belong in this area; most people in the area can be trusted/most people in this area cannot be trusted; most people in the area are friendly/most people in this area are unfriendly; and if you were in trouble, there are lots of people in this area who would help you/if you were in trouble, there is nobody in this area that would help you. Responses were recoded so that higher numbers corresponded to higher levels of cohesion.

Respondents also completed the modified version of the Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status.

The authors then fit a univariate latent growth curve model of change in cognitive function across waves and tested whether neighborhood cohesion during each recollected life stage predicted the level of cognitive function and change in cognitive function over time. The analyses were based on 25,991 observations collected from 3,599 respondents, equivalent to about 7.22 observations per participant.

Reference

[1] Choi, J., Han, S.H., Ng, Y.T., & Muñoz, E. (2023). Neighborhood cohesion across the life course and effects on cognitive aging. The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 78(10):1765-1774. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbad095 

Suggested Citation

Choi, J., Han, S.H., Ng, Y.T., & Muñoz, E. (2024). Greater neighborhood cohesion in childhood and in older adults’ current neighborhoods each predict higher cognitive function. CAPS Research Brief 3(2). https://doi.org/10.26153/tsw/50159

About the Authors

Jean Choi, jean.choi@austin.utexas.edu, is a PhD candidate in the department of Human Development and Family Sciences (HDFS) and a graduate student trainee in the Population Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin; Sae Hwang Han and Elizabeth Muñoz are assistant professors in HDFS, Center on Aging and Population faculty affiliates, and PRC faculty scholars, UT Austin; and Yee To Ng is a postdoctoral scholar in the department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, University of Michigan.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grant P30AG066614, awarded to the Center on Aging and Population Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin by the National Institute on Aging, grant R01AG054624, awarded to Debra Umberson, principal investigator, by the National Institute on Aging and by grant P2CHD042849, awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Funding for the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) data collection and RAND HRS data development was supported by the Social Security Administration and the National Institute on Aging.

This Center on Aging and Population Sciences (CAPS) research brief is published in partnership with UT Austin’s Population Research Center, which provides CAPS with high-quality services and resources to facilitate large-scale, population-based aging research.

As parents, we’ve all been there: your child breaks a rule, and you’re faced with a decision about how to respond. Do you come down hard with punishment, hoping to prevent future misbehavior? Or do you take a softer approach, explaining why the rule matters? Research from Brazil suggests that harsh discipline might actually backfire, not just in the moment, but in ways that echo throughout adolescence and beyond.

The Discipline Dilemma

My colleagues and I followed 800 Brazilian students from age 11 to 14, tracking how their parents’ disciplinary styles shaped their attitudes toward authority and their tendency to break rules. What we discovered challenges some common assumptions about parenting.

The study asked adolescents about their parents’ disciplinary practices. We also measured whether these young people saw their parents (and other authority figures like teachers and police) as legitimate—that is, as people who have the right to make rules and deserve to be obeyed. Finally, we tracked whether they engaged in rule-violating behaviors.

The results were striking: harsh discipline didn’t prevent rule-violating behavior. In fact, it undermined parents’ authority in their children’s eyes.

Why Harsh Discipline Falls Short

Here’s what we found: when parents frequently yelled, threatened, or used physical punishment, their adolescent children were less likely to see them as legitimate authorities. And this loss of legitimacy mattered. Adolescents who didn’t view their parents as legitimate were significantly more likely to break rules, even when those parents maintained strict discipline.

In contrast, simply having clear rules was associated with children viewing their parents as more legitimate. And crucially, this sense of parental legitimacy was the strongest predictor of whether adolescents complied with rules.

Think of it this way: harsh discipline might get temporary compliance out of fear, but it doesn’t build the internal sense that “my parents have the right to set these boundaries, and I should respect them.” That internal sense—what we call legitimacy—is what leads to lasting cooperation.

The Missing Link: Procedural Justice

But why does harsh discipline erode legitimacy? The answer is procedural justice, which means making decisions and enforcing rules fairly.

When parents use procedural justice, they:

• Give their children a chance to explain their side of the story
• Explain why they’re being reprimanded
• Listen before making decisions
• Speak politely, even when disciplining

Our research found that adolescents whose parents practiced procedural justice were far more likely to see them as legitimate authorities. In fact, procedural justice was the main pathway through which parenting practices influenced whether kids viewed their parents’ authority as valid.

Harsh discipline, by contrast, violates these principles. When parents yell, threaten, or punish without explanation, children don’t feel heard or respected. They may obey in the moment out of fear, but they don’t internalize the lesson or respect the authority behind it.

A Fully Mediated Relationship

Our statistical analysis revealed that perceived legitimacy fully mediated the relationship between parental discipline and rule-violating behavior.

This means that parental discipline doesn’t directly influence whether adolescents break rules. Instead, discipline affects how kids think their parents are, and that determines whether they’ll follow the rules. It’s not about the strictness of the punishment, it’s about whether children believe their parents have the right to set those boundaries in the first place.

This finding flips conventional wisdom on its head. Many parents assume that stricter, harsher discipline will deter misbehavior. But our research suggests that what really matters is whether your approach to discipline helps your children see you as a fair and legitimate authority.

Beyond the Family: A Ripple Effect

Perhaps most importantly, we found that how adolescents view their parents’ legitimacy doesn’t just affect their behavior at home—it shapes their attitudes toward all authority figures. Young people who saw their parents as legitimate also tended to view teachers and police as more legitimate. Those who experienced harsh, unfair discipline at home were more cynical about authority across the board.

This makes sense when you consider that the parent-child relationship is children’s first experience with authority. It becomes a template for how they understand power and rules throughout their lives. If that first experience teaches them that authority is arbitrary, unfair, and based on force rather than legitimacy, those lessons carry forward into their interactions with teachers, police, and eventually their own children.

A Brazilian Context, A Universal Message

We conducted this research in São Paulo, Brazil—a city marked by significant inequality and frequent police violence. You might wonder whether findings from this context apply elsewhere.

In fact, the Brazilian setting makes our findings even more powerful. If procedural justice and legitimacy matter in a context where harsh treatment by authority figures is relatively common, they likely matter even more in contexts where expectations for fair treatment are higher. The basic principle appears to be universal: people—including children—are more likely to cooperate with authority when they believe that authority is legitimate and treats them fairly.

What Parents Can Do

So what’s the takeaway for parents? Here are some practical implications:

Focus on fairness over harshness. When your child breaks a rule, resist the urge to immediately escalate to yelling or threats. Instead, think about how to handle the situation fairly.

Explain, don’t just punish. Help your child understand why a rule exists and why their behavior was problematic. This builds understanding rather than just compliance.

Listen before deciding. Give your child a chance to explain what happened from their perspective. Even if you ultimately decide they were wrong, the fact that you listened matters.

Be consistent with clear rules. Our research showed that simply having clear parental rules was associated with greater legitimacy. Consistency and clarity help children understand boundaries.

Remember that respect goes both ways. You want your children to respect your authority, but that respect is earned through fair treatment, not demanded through force.

The Long View

Parenting is exhausting, and in the heat of the moment, harsh discipline can feel like the fastest way to restore order. But our research suggests this approach comes with hidden costs that accumulate over time. Each instance of unfair treatment chips away at your legitimacy in your child’s eyes, making future cooperation less likely.

The good news? You don’t need to be perfect. You just need to be consistently fair. When you make decisions thoughtfully, explain your reasoning, and treat your children with respect you build a foundation of legitimacy that makes everything else easier.

That foundation doesn’t just make your life as a parent easier right now. It shapes how your children will understand and interact with authority for the rest of their lives. In that sense, choosing procedural justice over harsh discipline isn’t just about preventing tonight’s argument. It’s about investing in the kind of adults your children will become.

Herbert Rodrigues is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Gerontology at Missouri State University. His research focuses on youth development, legal socialization, and juvenile delinquency, with particular attention to how young people from marginalized communities form attitudes toward authority and law. His work has appeared in the Journal of Research on Adolescence, British Journal of Criminology, International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, and Social Justice Research.

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Vanessa Delgado, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Washington State University

Today, the majority of American parents financially support their adult children. Estimates suggest that only a quarter of young adults are financially independent and rely on their parents for financial support well into their 30s. Parents and their adult children are more financially interconnected than ever before.

However, in immigrant families, financial support is reversed.

Studies suggest that young adults with immigrant parents are more likely to “give back” financially when compared to young adults with native-born parents, that is, parents who are born in the U.S. Adult children of immigrants feel a greater sense of obligation to support their parents and actively contribute to medical bills, rent or mortgage, household expenses, and even work-related costs. Notably, adult children of immigrants even “give back” when they no longer live in the parental home.

Existing research assumes children of immigrants’ financial contributions are uniform. But I find they’re not.

In a study published in Social Problems, I argue that parental immigration status shapes adult children of immigrants’ decisions to “give back” in immigrant families. I find that young adults with undocumented parents are more likely to give back financially than young adults with documented parents. I also find that the adult children of undocumented immigrants are more likely to give direct cash transfers, pay household bills, develop financial plans for homeownership and retirement, open credit cards on behalf of parents, take on debt, and worry about their parents’ financial futures.

There are several reasons why the adult children of undocumented immigrants feel more obligated to “give back.” First, undocumented immigrants are more likely to take on precarious jobs that pay very little and do not provide important benefits like healthcare, overtime, and sick leave. Second, undocumented immigrants are prohibited from accessing federal social services such as the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (i.e., Social Security) Program, Medicaid or Medicare, and Food Supplementary Programs (i.e., food stamps). Third, many banks and retirement insurance policies require a social security number to open an account. Fourth, undocumented immigrants are subject to deportation, which financially devastates families. The adult children of undocumented immigrants feel compelled to take on a greater financial role in the family because their undocumented parents experience significant barriers to economic security.

Overall, this study demonstrates that immigration status is a powerful axis of stratification among immigrant families. An undocumented immigration status transforms the needs of immigrant families, as it blocks pathways to upward mobility and positions adult children of immigrants to take on greater financial responsibilities. The imprint of parental undocumented status is likely to follow young adults throughout the life course as the absence of amnesty relief reaches almost four decades and their undocumented parents grow older without access to public safety nets.

For More Information, Please Contact:

Vanessa Delgado, Ph.D
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Washington State University
Email: vanessa.delgado@wsu.edu
Twitter: @VanessaD015

Discussions of trans youth and their families typically focus on relationships with parents: how parents allow, promote, or discourage particular gender identities and expressions. But a family is often more than parents, and relationships with other family members, such as siblings, can be especially important for young people. Correcting an over-emphasis on parents in existing research, my colleagues and I wanted to hear from trans youth about the role their siblings played in shaping their family experience. We interviewed 52 trans youth and asked them what their siblings did and did not do about their gender identities.

Our new study discovered trans youth often identify their siblings as supportive family members. In our interviews, we found that siblings affirm the identities of trans youth by being “chill” when they come out, using correct names and pronouns, and standing up to people who misgender their trans siblings. In turn, we highlight the roles siblings play in challenging cisnormativity—social norms that ignore or harm trans people.

“Chill” responses to coming out

Disclosing a transgender identity to family members is often distressing for youth, and fears of family rejection contribute to anxieties around coming out. Many of our interviewees particularly expected and experienced rejection or stigmatization from parents when they came out as transgender or nonbinary. But Leaf (18, Asian American, trans man, he/him) recalled that his oldest sister was “completely chill” since he told her he is a man. (All names here are pseudonyms participants chose for themselves.) Unlike when he came out to his parents, when Leaf came out to his sister, it was “like telling her, ‘Oh yeah, I dye my hair this color.’ ‘Okay.’”

Leaf is not the only one we talked with who has a “chill” sibling. As Lorren (18, Chicana, nonbinary, they/he/she) explained, “[my sister] knows who I am and she doesn’t care…As long as I’m me, it’s fine.” Leaf, Lorreen, and others we interviewed agree: they felt safe to be themselves around their siblings, because their siblings thought it was no big deal.

Navigating cisnormativity

For many of our participants, siblings also actively affirmed the gender identity of trans youth. For instance, siblings would call trans youth by their chosen name and pronouns. In doing so, they challenged cisnormativity within their family.

Siblings also stood up to parents when they tried to control how trans youth expressed their gender. When parents would criticize how their trans youth expressed themselves through hair styles, makeup, and clothing, siblings sometimes got involved. They discouraged parents from being too controlling and instead encouraged parents to respect the authority of trans youth themselves.

But in some families, outright challenges to cisnormativity did not feel safe to participants. Clay (16, Hispanic/White, trans man, he/him), who has a transphobic dad, explained that he asked his siblings and mom to deadname (use his name assigned at birth) and misgender him around their dad. And yet Clay’s siblings also use his chosen name and gender-affirming pronouns when their dad is not around, which Clay liked because “they know the truth” about his gender.

Trans youth and their siblings strategically navigate gender recognition to promote the safety of trans youth within their family of origin. Safety was an important concern for our participants, who all had negative or mixed relationships with their parents, because of the high rates of homelessness and housing instability for trans youth. But even when it is not safe to be completely out in a family, trans youth found partners in their siblings to feel less alone.

Standing up to others

The support trans youth reported receiving from their siblings also extended beyond the family. Siblings encouraged other people to resist cisnormativity by correcting individuals who deadname or misgender trans youth. For example, Devon (18, Hispanic, nonbinary, they/them) explained that it can be hard for people to use they/them pronouns, but their sisters “are very adamant about correcting people on my behalf.” Even though Devon doesn’t like correcting people because they are shy, their sisters would tell people “It’s they. They’re nonbinary. It’s they.” By correcting how other people refer to trans youth, siblings challenge the assumption that gender is binary and that everyone is cisgender.

What makes siblings important?

The family has been described by some gender scholars as a “gender factory” because of the important role parents play in how their children perform gender, either by reinforcing traditional forms of masculinity and femininity for children assigned male or female at birth, or by encouraging and embracing children’s nonconforming gender expressions or trans identities. The findings in our study highlight the part siblings might play in this “gender factory.” Because of the research design and sample selection in this study, nearly all participants had parents who were unsupportive or ambivalent (a mix of supportive and unsupportive) toward their transgender, nonbinary, or gender diverse identities. However, about 81% of our participants had at least one supportive sibling.

Our study encourages more attention to children and youth as agents of change in families. Understanding how gender norms shift requires looking beyond parents and recognizing the important role of siblings. Even though children and youth are often seen as disempowered within families, our findings show that siblings challenge cisnormativity and encourage others to resist oppressive gender norms.

Katherine Alexander (she/her) is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Rice University. Her research focuses on gender, health and medicine, and family. In particular, Katherine’s research examines the experiences of LGBTQ+ people in navigating and resisting cisnormativity and heteronormativity in areas like family and medicine using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Her research has been published in the Journal of Homosexuality, Social Science and Medicine, and Gender & Society. Follow her on Substack @ksalexander.

Reprinted from Council on Contemporary Families Brief Report

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Renee Ryberg, Child Trends, and Arielle Kuperberg, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

April 2, 2025

One in five students at community and four-year colleges in the United States are raising children while trying to earn their degrees—and this number may grow as access to abortion becomes more limited. Many student parents find themselves in precarious economic positions, and are often on their own to pay for college. As we found in a new study of students at two public four-year universities, fewer than 1 in 10 (9%) student parents got financial help from their own parents to pay for college tuition or living expenses. By contrast, nearly two-thirds (64%) of childless students received financial help from their parents.

The higher education landscape continues to evolve, serving a more diverse student body. The average college student today is no longer the carefree, wealthy 18–22-year-old highlighted in American movies. Although higher education—and the economic benefits that come with it—are available to more people, there is a fundamental mismatch between how colleges were designed and the realities of many of today’s students. Higher education was designed for students to depend on their families, with students’ parents largely footing the bill.

But, as our new study in The Journal of Higher Education finds, that is often not the reality students with children face. Although student parents tend to be older than students without children, differences in age or background (race, parents’ education, region, gender, grew up in US) don’t explain all of the gap in help from their parents. When examining students of the same age and background, we found that the odds that a student parent received help from their parents to pay for college was one-third of that of a student without children.

This disparity puts barriers to graduation in front of the 3.1 million undergraduate student parents pursuing higher education to better the lives of themselves and their children. Instead of getting help from their parents, student parents must draw on a unique and complex set of resources to pay for tuition and living expenses while navigating a college system that was not designed for them.

Examining how Student Parents Pay for College

To examine how student parents pay for college, we analyzed unique survey data collected in 2017 from 2,830 students at two regional public universities. Of those who completed the survey, 338, or 12 percent, identified as parents—a rate comparable to the national rate of student parents at public four-year colleges and universities.

More than half of the student parents that we surveyed used student loans, Pell grants, or money earned from a job to pay for college—the same resources that many of their fellow students without children rely on. But, parents and nonparents rely on these resources to different degrees. And, student parents can’t count on their families to pay for higher education in the same way that childless students do—and the way the system was designed.

Why don’t students with children get support from their parents when paying for college? After all, they have additional expenses and responsibilities compared to students without children.

One reason is that students who have children are more likely to be considered “adults,” so their families may believe that they should be more financially independent. Or, their families may want to support them through college – but may not be able to do so. Student parents tend to come from families with fewer resources, so their parents may not have extra cash on hand to help them with rent or tuition.

So how do student parents pay for college, if they aren’t getting help from their parents?

Instead of Relying on Support from their Parents, Student Parents Rely on Support from Romantic Partners and the Government

Many student parents rely on support from romantic partners, including spouses: in our survey we found that 43 percent of student parents used a partner’s money to pay for educational and living expenses, compared with less than 10 percent of students without children. 

The support that student parents received from their partners didn’t necessarily make up for not getting financial support from their parents, though. The proportion of student parents who received support from either their parents or partnerswas less than the percent of students without children who received support from their parents.

Student parents also turn to Pell Grants—a federal grant program for students with low incomes or who have parents with low incomes. Two-thirds (66%) of student parents in our study used Pell Grants to pay for college. Once background characteristics are taken into account, the odds that a student parent used Pell Grants was more than three times that of students without children.

Policy Pitfalls for Student Parents

As student parents pursue higher education, they navigate a funding environment at odds with the realities of their lives.

Pell grants do not typically cover the full cost of tuition, much less living expenses. Perhaps because of the relatively low value of Pell grants, and because students with children could not rely on their parents’ financial support, we found student parents took out higher amounts of student loans. They were also more likely to work while in college.

Juggling a job, child care, and college while also navigating a complex financial situation makes it harder to complete a degree. Indeed, research shows that although student parents have GPAs as high as students without children, they are more likely to leave college without a degree.  

But completing a college degree can really pay off for student parents—and their children. One study focused on single mothers found that those who completed a four-year degree were one-third as likely as those who had a high school degree to live below the poverty line, and earned an additional $625,000 across their lifetime. Single mothers who completed a college degree were also less likely to use public assistance programs and contributed more tax revenue.

So what can we do to facilitate success for student parents?

Within the financial aid system, it is critical that financial aid officers are trained to best support students with children. Child care expenses can be factored into loan and grant packages, but many financial aid officers do not communicate this information to students. Pell grants can also be expanded to cover a larger share of tuition and living expenses.

Beyond the financial aid system, many student parents are eligible for federal anti-poverty programs aimed at families with children, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Child Care Development Fund (CCDF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and tax credits including the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the Child Tax Credit (CTC), and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC). Navigation services on campus can help student parents access this disparate patchwork of supports.

Although many student parents turn to these programs to make ends meet, they are often penalized for being in school. Many of these programs are structured in ways that prevent student parents from receiving full benefits. Work requirements in some states do not fully count going to school. And, other programs, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, provide lower benefits to workers who earn the least money.

Schools can also help lower costs for student parents by expanding affordable child care offerings to their students, and building affordable family housing on campus, as most colleges do not allow students with children to move into campus housing or have on-campus child care for students.

Training financial aid officers on the needs of student parents, expanding Pell funding, reforming anti-poverty programs to value the long-term investment of pursuing higher education, and building infrastructure on campus that supports parents could help support student parents to complete their degrees—increasing their long-term economic stability and self-sufficiency—which will benefit their children as well.

Acknowledgements

The study discussed in this briefing paper is published in The Journal of Higher Education. We would like to thank JR Moller and Stephanie Pruitt for their research assistance. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. 1947603, and a University of North Carolina at Greensboro Advancing Research Summer Award Grant and Faculty Research Grant, as administered by the Office of Sponsored Programs.

Links

Brief report: https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2025/04/02/student-parents-brief-report/
Full study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00221546.2025.2480024/

For more information, please contact:

Renee Ryberg, Senior Research Scientist, Child Trends
rryberg@chidltrends.org

Website: https://www.childtrends.org/staff/renee-ryberg
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renee-ryberg-8b2a1a2b/

Reprinted from the Council on Contemporary Families Brief Reports

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Zhe (Meredith) Zhang, California State University, Los Angeles

Many people have the experience of providing care to family and friends with serious health conditions or limitations. Most people will provide such unpaid care to their loved ones at some point in their lives. In 2020, about 53 million U.S. adults or 21.3% of the population provided unpaid care such as preparing meals, providing transportation, managing medications, dressing, or bathing a loved one with health limitations or disabilities in the past year. This number of caregivers will continue to rise with the aging American population as most of those receiving such care are older adults.

In a class of mine, I asked the students who would come to their minds when they thought about unpaid caregivers. Most of them mentioned a wife, daughter, sister, or mother. Their observations are consistent with the established research, which has found that in general, women are more likely to be providing care than men.

However, one limitation of this prior research is that it seldom considers sexual orientation. A burgeoning literature suggests that sexual minorities may provide more care than heterosexuals, but many questions remain unanswered. Does it mean that gay and bisexual men are more likely to provide care than heterosexual men? Are women’s higher caregiving rates only prominent among heterosexuals? Do sexual minority men have similar caregiving rates as sexual minority women?

We need to consider sexual orientation in a study of caregiving for several reasons. First, the number of Americans identifying as a sexual minority (e.g., gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer) has continued to increase for the past decade (Jones 2022). Second, gay, lesbian, and bisexual adults have lower partnership and childbearing rates than heterosexuals, which may lead to different caregiving networks and demands (Croghan et al. 2014; Ismail et al. 2020). For instance, sexual minorities’ lower partnership rate relative to heterosexuals may mean that they have fewer demands of providing care to an aging partner.

In a paper recently published in Demography (Zhang et al. 2024), my coauthors and I examined how unpaid caregiving is associated with both gender and sexual identity. One of the main findings in our paper is that not all men have lower caregiving rates relative to women. It is only among heterosexuals that we see a lower caregiving rate among men than women. Gay and bisexual men have similar caregiving rates as lesbian and bisexual women. Heterosexual men’s caregiving rate is much lower than that of bisexual men. This low caregiving rate for heterosexual men may reflect their stricter adherence to gender norms around division of labor (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), which emphasize that men are responsible for paid work and women are responsible for domestic work such as caregiving. On the other hand, gay and bisexual men in the U.S. tend to hold less conservative views on gender (Denise 2019), which may help explain their higher caregiving rates.

Next, we examined whether the association between unpaid caregiving, gender, and sexual identity varied by partnership status (i.e., whether one is married/in a relationship). We found that unpartnered bisexual men were more likely to provide care than unpartnered heterosexual men, unpartnered gay men, and partnered bisexual men. Bisexual people generally report less social support from family, friends, and LGBT+ communities than heterosexuals and gay/lesbian adults (Dodge et al. 2012; Gorman et al. 2015). Additionally, bisexual men may experience unique stressors related to the perceptions that bisexual men are either not fully “out” as gay men or are unfairly tied to straight privilege (Anderson and McCormack 2016). Feeling even more isolated, unpartnered bisexual men may be particularly incentivized to provide care to a loved one to facilitate more social connection.

To further understand the experiences of these caregivers, we also examined caregivers’ relationship to the care recipient. Among the caregivers, we found that gay, lesbian, and bisexual caregivers generally reported less spouse/partner caregiving than heterosexual men and women, likely because they are less likely to have a partner than heterosexuals. The absence of a partner probably makes sexual minorities more available to care for other loved ones, such as grandparents. We found that sexual minority caregivers were more likely to provide care to a grandparent relative to their heterosexual peers. We also found that heterosexual, gay, lesbian, and bisexual caregivers had similar rates of parental caregiving. This echoes prior work, which showed that sexual minority adult children continued to provide care for older parents even when parents disapproved of their sexuality (Cronin et al. 2011; Reczek and Umberson 2016).

Additionally, we find higher rates of friend caregiving among sexual minority caregivers, particularly among lesbian women. Among the caregivers, nearly a quarter of lesbian women were caring for a friend compared to 14% of heterosexual women. In additional analysis that considers partnership status, we also found that gay men without a partner had higher rates of caring for friends (33%) than unpartnered heterosexual (21%) and bisexual men (15%). In general, prior work has shown that sexual minorities, many of whom are alienated from families of origin, have long built families of choice with whom they share no biological or legal relationship (Lavender-Stott and Allen 2023; MetLife 2010). Research has shown that sexual minorities often provide care to friends that are part of these chosen families. During the HIV/AIDS epidemic, most people infected with HIV identified a gay friend as both their primary caregiver and family (Fredriksen-Goldsen 2007). Taken together, our results suggest that caregiving for a friend may be particularly common among lesbian women and unpartnered gay men.

Overall, our study provides a comprehensive overview of caregiving rates by gender, sexual identity, and partnership status among American adults. We find that women’s higher caregiving rate relative to men’s is only prominent among heterosexuals. Caregiving rates do not differ by sexuality among women, but bisexual men (especially those without a partner) have a much higher caregiving rate than heterosexual men. We also find that among the caregivers, adults of varying gender and sexual identity groups may provide care to different social ties (e.g., parents, partners, or friends). Altogether, our findings help advance understanding of caregiving and changing family ties in an era of population aging and increasing diversity in sexual identities.

For More Information, Please Contact:

Zhe (Meredith) Zhang
Assistant Professor of Sociology
California State University, Los Angeles
mzhang19@calstatela.edu

Links

Brief report: https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2024/05/23/unpaid-caregiving-brief-report/
Press release: https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2024/05/23/unpaid-caregiving-press-release/

About CCF

The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas-Austin, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions For more information, contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, coontzs@msn.com. 

References

Anderson, E., & McCormack, M. (2016). The changing dynamics of bisexual men’s lives: Social research perspectives. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.

Connell, R. W., & Messerschmidt, J. W. (2005). Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender & Society, 19, 829–859.

Croghan, C. F., Moone, R. P., & Olson, A. M. (2014). Friends, family, and caregiving among midlife and older lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender adults. Journal of Homosexuality, 61, 79–102.

Cronin, A., Ward, R., Pugh, S., King, A., & Price, E. (2011). Categories and their consequences: Understanding and supporting the caring relationships of older lesbian, gay and bisexual people. International Social Work, 54, 421–435.

Denise, E. J. (2019). Americans’ gender attitudes at the intersection of sexual orientation and gender. Journal of Homosexuality, 66, 141–172.

Dodge, B., Schnarrs, P. W., Reece, M., Goncalves, G., Martinez, O., Nix, R., . . . Fortenberry, J. D. (2012). Community involvement among behaviourally bisexual men in the midwestern USA: Experiences and perceptions across communities. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 14, 1095–1110.

Fredriksen-Goldsen, K. I. (2007). HIV/AIDS caregiving: Predictors of well-being and distress. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services, 18(3–4), 53–73.

Gorman, B. K., Denney, J. T., Dowdy, H., & Medeiros, R. A. (2015). A new piece of the puzzle: Sexual orientation, gender, and physical health status. Demography, 52, 1357–1382.

Ismail, M., Hammond, N. G., Wilson, K., & Stinchcombe, A. (2020). Canadians who care: Social networks and informal caregiving among lesbian, gay, and bisexual older adults in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 91, 299–316.

Jones, J. M. (2022, February 17). LGBT Identification in U.S. Ticks Up to 7.1%. Gallup News. Retrieved from https://news.gallup.com/poll/389792/lgbt-identification-ticks-up.aspx

Lavender‐Stott, E. S., & Allen, K. R. (2023). Not alone: Family experiences across the life course of single, baby boom sexual‐minority women. Family Relations, 72, 140–158.

MetLife Mature Market Institute. (2010). Out and aging: The MetLife study of lesbian and gay baby boomers. Journal of GLBT Family Studies, 6, 40–57.

Reczek, C., & Umberson, D. (2016). Greedy spouse, needy parent: The marital dynamics of gay, lesbian, and heterosexual intergenerational caregivers. Journal of Marriage and Family, 78, 957–974.

Zhang, Z., Smith-Johnson, M. & Gorman, B. K. (2024). Who cares? unpaid caregiving by sexual identity, gender, and partnership status among U.S. adults.” Demography, DOI 10.1215/00703370-11145841.

Christina J. Cross is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard and a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. Her award-winning writing has been featured in The New York Times and in leading sociology journals. You can follow her on Twitter: @christinajcross or BlueSky: @christinajcross.bsky.social. Here I ask her about her new book, Inherited Inequality: Why Opportunity Gaps Persist between Black and White Youth Raised in Two-Parent.

AMW: Many people believe strongly that growing up with two parents is the main way for children to be successful, and that it especially helps Black families catch up. But your book shows that even Black kids who grow up with two parents often face big challenges that white kids in similar families don’t. What was the biggest or most surprising thing you found that showed you the two-parent family isn’t the “Great Equalizer” people often think it is? 

CC: One of the most striking and disappointing findings that I uncovered in my research was that African American children from two-parent families often experience the same outcomes as white children raised in single-parent families.

Black kids who live with both their parents have virtually the same rates of suspension and expulsion as white kids who live apart from a parent, and both groups have roughly the same average high school GPA and likelihood of on-time high school completion.

It’s bad enough that gaps in outcomes between Black and white kids from two-parent families are as wide as those between the average child who lives in a single-parent versus two-parent family—as I also find. But to think that Black youth who grow up with two parents in the home often find themselves in the same position as white children who experience parental absence from the home really speaks to the limits of the two-parent family for being an equalizer for kids.

AMW: The book talks about looking at the bigger picture around families, not just who lives in the house, but also things like racism, neighborhoods, and schools. Can you explain how things outside a family’s home can make life harder for a two-parent Black family compared to a two-parent white family?

CC: It’s undeniable that what happens at home matters a great deal for children. However, people tend to underestimate the impact of outside forces. And these outside forces can lead to enormous inequalities between children—even among those growing up with two parents.

For example, family income plays a critical role in shaping children’s later life opportunities.  Research has shown that at every level of education, African American men and women are paid less than their similarly qualified white counterparts. And black-white gaps in earnings are higher among those with college degrees than for those with a high school diploma. If each Black parent brings home less money than their similarly qualified white counterpart, then pay discrimination is visited upon Black two-parent households twice. This results in Black couples having substantially less money to invest in their children’s futures. In fact, I found that by adolescence, African American youth from two-parent families have household incomes that are only 60% of their white peers who are raised in this same family structure.

Another area of social life that greatly impacts family life is schooling. I found that Black youth from two-parent families are two to four times more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than their white peers who grow up with both parents. These disparities in school discipline cannot be explained by behavioral differences between the two groups. My data show that both groups engage in similar types of behavior.

What does differ between Black and white children is how these behaviors are interpreted. Research shows that teachers are more likely to view African American students’ actions as threating and disrespectful than white students. This is another way in which discrimination leads to worse outcomes for Black and white children—even when they’re both raised in two-parent families.

AWM: For a long time, the common story about inequality for Black families focused on single parenthood. Your book presents a different understanding. What is the main, new “story” about families, race, and opportunity that you hope your book helps people understand?

CC: The common story treats African Americans as architects of their own fate. They have a harder time getting ahead in life because they have failed to embody the nuclear family ideal. If they could simply get married and stay married, many of the problems that they are facing would go away.

While it’s true that children who live in two-parent families typically have better outcomes than children who live apart from a parent, my book uncovers a critical, but all too often overlooked detail: the resources and outcomes of this family structure are not equally available to all. I found that even when Black and white children lived in the same type of family, their educational and employment outcomes differed drastically. This inequality of opportunity largely reflected resource disparities—like income, wealth, and parent’s mental health— between Black and white two-parent families. And these resource disparities are not random; they are a result of America’s legacy of slavery, racism and social exclusion.

I hope that my book will help to dismantle the common story and replace it with the one that more accurately reflects the experiences of the roughly 5 million African American children who currently live in two-parent families—and whose stories all too often go untold. My results show that even when African Americans live in the “ideal” family structure, the shadow of inequality looms large. Marriage is no panacea for racial inequality.

However, there are things that we can do to help level the playing field. My results show that Black children would perform profoundly better, and their downstream outcomes would dramatically improve, if racial disparities in access to resources were mitigated, and if the harmful effects of racism were redressed. Doing so would get us much closer to achieving the shared goal of generating greater equality of opportunity for the next generation—regardless of the type of family that generation is born into.

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University and the author of two previous books on infidelity, and a forthcoming book, Bound by BDSM: Unexpected Lessons for Building a Happier Life (Bloomsbury Fall 2025) coauthored with Arielle Kuperberg. She is the current Editor in Chief of the Council of Contemporary Families blog, serves as Senior Fellow with CCF, and serves as Co-Chair of CCF alongside Arielle Kuperberg. Learn more about her on her website. Follow her on Twitter or Bluesky at @AliciaMWalker1, Facebook, her Hidden Desires column, and Instagram @aliciamwalkerphd

Elizabethe Payne is director of the Queering Education Research Institute (QuERI). Her work focuses on advancing the well-being of gender and sexual minority students through research-to-policy efforts at the state and federal levels. She is currently completing a 10-year research project exploring implementation of LGBTQ-inclusive state anti-bullying law in New York. Dr. Payne was the recipient of the 2022-2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Educational Research Association Congressional Fellowship.  She also serves on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Committee for Bullying and Cyberbullying. Her work has appeared in a number of publications including Teachers College Record, QED: A Journal of GLBTQ World Making, and Educational Administration Quarterly. You can find her on bluesky @ecpayne. QuERI is on bluesky & FB @QueeringEDU. Here I talk to her about her book, Queer Kids and Social Violence: The Limits of Bullying

AMW: What are some of the broader social forces you see at play when queer kids experience violence in school settings and how do schools often overlook them?

EP: Bullying, as a concept, does not currently encompass the range of behaviors that regulate gender expressions. The majority of bullying research has been “gender blind”–failing to look at the sociocultural context of bullying and the ways many bullying behaviors are rooted in reinforcing the rules for “appropriate” gender behavior and sexuality. When discussions of bullying do turn to gender, they largely reinforce gendered stereotypes and essentialized norms of masculinity and femininity rather than exploring the policing of gender boundaries as a primary social function of bullying behavior. Bullying behaviors are not antisocial but rather highly social acts deeply entrenched in the perpetuation of cultural norms and values. Significantly, those norms usually require a fixed relationship between (cis/hetero) gender, sex and sexuality.  Students’ speech, behavior, and self-presentation are regulated by cultural rules mapping the “right” way to exist in the school environment, and youths’ everyday gender policing practices often fail to draw adults’ attention because these behaviors largely align with educator beliefs and the institutional values of school. Young people’s attitudes about difference are partially formed in a school-based social scene that rewards conformity. Youth regularly regulate and discipline the boundaries between “normal” and “different” along the lines of sex, gender, and sexuality and their intersections with race, class, ability, and this process can be a mechanism for acquiring and increasing social status. These patterns of aggression occur constantly throughout the school, producing and reproducing systems of value based on gender conformity, and they often occur within friendship groups making it all the more difficult to see and to intervene. It is, therefore, important to examine the various ways in which schools institutionalize heterosexuality and cisgender identity, silence and marginalize queerness, and support social positioning practices that privilege idealized cisgender and heterosexual identities and behaviors. Current understandings of and responses to bullying depoliticize violence against queer kids, which is part of the continued appeal. Aggression targeting LGBTQ+ students needs to be understood within a broader system of gender regulation that is experienced by all people and in multiple contexts.

AMW: In what ways do you think our current focus on anti-bullying programs might be missing the mark when it comes to actually protecting queer students?

EP: Over time, it has become clear that “anti-bullying” and other individualized interventions are not creating significant change. Anti-bullying programs and policies may be successful (at least temporarily) at decreasing overtly violent acts and making adults more aware of harmful peer dynamics, but such behavioral changes do not challenge norms or values upholding discrimination against sexuality and gender diversity and these discriminatory norms provide permission for youth to target their peers. Patriarchal, cisheteronormative power structures in which these norms are anchored have been largely undisturbed in Western elementary and secondary schools. These are the cultural conditions in which youth learn lessons about gender hierarchies, queer stigma, and gender policing. Portrayal of bullying is decoupled from structural power relations, and focus is placed on the actions of individual students reinforcing the binaries of bully/victim, bad kid/good kid. Intervention efforts are directed toward the individual youth involved in the interaction rather than the structural inequalities that allow for some groups of students to be the targets and others to be the perpetrators. This also enables blame to be placed outside the school—poorly socialized children bring the problem into the school—and avoid examination of the school culture and its role. The bullying discourse has produced a simplistic, taken-for-granted narrative about bullied youth that schools and other institutions can uncritically absorb.  Anti-bullying programs are more often pushing violent behavior underground than they are calling systemic privileging and marginalization into question. Additionally, the increased surveillance and reporting that often accompanies anti-bullying programs disproportionately impacts already marginalized youth including LGBTQ+ youth and students of color.

AMW: What do you hope educators, parents, or even fellow students take away from this book—especially those who want to create lasting, positive change for LGBTQ+ youth?

EP: The questions most often asked about bullying are behavior management questions not questions about the ideological roots of persistent, predictable, patterns of peer targeting. Policies and practices should not only address bullying as it occurs, but also identify and address cultural systems that stimulate and support bullying behaviors and the targeting of difference. Bullying is a complex social problem, not the effect of individual bad children. Educators need to understand the social tools youth use to discriminate, link those tools to institutional culture, and take action to address school participation in supporting categories of marginalization. We know from past intervention efforts that a “just say no” approach is ineffective. We need to make their patterns of targeting visible to youth, talk with them about why they feel it is OK to target others based on a particular identity or characteristic. We need to have uncomfortable conversations about the ways that adults in a school, and outside it, also use gender norms to shame and degrade young people. Bullying is social, not anti-social behavior. It serves a social function and policies boundaries between normal/acceptable and different/not tolerated. We want educators, parents, students to come away from the book seeing bullying as a social problem, not only an individual one, and ready to think in new ways about it.

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University and the author of two previous books on infidelity, and a forthcoming book, Bound by BDSM: Unexpected Lessons for Building a Happier Life (Bloomsbury Fall 2025) coauthored with Arielle Kuperberg. She is the current Editor in Chief of the Council of Contemporary Families blog, serves as Senior Fellow with CCF, and serves as Co-Chair of CCF alongside Arielle Kuperberg. Learn more about her on her website. Follow her on Twitter or Bluesky at @AliciaMWalker1, Facebook, her Hidden Desires column, and Instagram @aliciamwalkerphd

“I’m so heartbroken I can barely breathe… Aren’t I family?”

Reprinted from Psychology Today

Dear Readers, enjoy this reprint from Joshua Coleman, a leading expert on marriage and relationships, Dr. Coleman ‘s advice has been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, The Chicago Tribune, Parenting Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Psychology Today, and many others.

Key points

• Grandparents play a valuable role in grandchildren’s lives, providing security and identity.
• Contact with grandparents is on the decline.
• A cultural shift towards severing ties with grandparents needs critical evaluation.

You can live with a broken heart, and you can die with one. But it’s terrible to have to do both.” —An estranged grandmother

Jessica is the 67-year-old mother of Robert, 42. She divorced his father when he was 6 and raised Robert as a single parent with little support.

During COVID-19, Robert and his wife Marie moved into Jessica’s house for a year with their daughter after Robert lost his job in the restaurant business. Their daughter, Charlene, was 5 at the time. Jessica says:

“It wasn’t easy having everyone under one roof, but I really cherished that time with my granddaughter. I’d take her to school and pick her up every day, cook for everyone, and put her to bed most nights so they could go out or relax. I didn’t complain about it, and they didn’t complain about me as a grandmother. I could tell my daughter-in-law was jealous of how much my granddaughter was attached to me, but it didn’t ever come up as an issue other than the occasional glare in my direction.”

Jessica continues:

“Robert eventually got another job, they moved out, and I assumed I’d continue to be active in my granddaughter’s life. I was wrong. About two months after they moved, I got a letter saying they wanted to ‘take a break from the relationship,’ that they had problems with my ‘lack of boundaries,’ and suggested I go to therapy. I was confused, to say the least, but I wanted to know when I could see my granddaughter since this had nothing to do with her. My son said that the relationship with me was bad for his mental health, it was negatively impacting his marriage, and he needed to prioritize his family’s happiness. ‘Well, aren’t I family?’ I asked him and he said, ‘You know what I mean,’ and I said, ‘No I really don’t.’ He said, ‘If our relationship isn’t good for me, then it’s not good for our daughter.’ I’m so heartbroken I can barely breathe.”

Thousands of grandparents today have been cut off from contact with their grandchildren. While this sometimes results from the grandparent’s highly problematic behavior toward the grandchild, my clinical experience, as illustrated in the case above, reveals that grandchildren are often a casualty of the conflict between parents and grandparents.

A recent Fortune survey revealed that contact with grandparents may be on the decline. While 41 percent of Gen X say they have a very close or strong relationship with their grandparents, only 18 percent of Gen Z acknowledged the same. This is tragic since studies show that the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren is not only good for the well-being of the grandparents but also the grandchildren’s development.

Grandparents can make a grandchild feel more secure and loved. They can also correct problematic or even traumatizing behavior from the parents. In a non-estranged environment, grandparents can monitor problematic or dysfunctional family behavior and, where possible, intervene on behalf of the grandchild.

Grandparents also can serve as a rich resource of identity, history, and stories of family members. Because they are often more invested in perpetuating the family lineage, they may carry emigration stories, family recipes, clothing, or culture. Grandparents also provide a different role model of behavior for the child. They might have artistic or intellectual interests that speak to the grandchild, different from the parents’.

In short, grandparents can create a foundation of safety, security, and identity whose removal may be deeply hurtful and disorienting to the grandchild.

Our culture’s disdain for aging reveals itself in the little regard accorded to the role of grandparents when family conflict occurs. Grandparents are viewed as one more relationship to be disposed of when they don’t satisfy the criteria required to sustain today’s parent–adult-child relationships. This is true even when the adult child acknowledges that the grandchildren loved the grandparent, as with Robert.

It is curious to me that a generation that has redefined what should be considered abusive or traumatizing child-rearing is so casual when it comes to casting a grandparent out of their own children’s lives. For a generation obsessed with closely hewing to theories on attachment between themselves and their children, it is remarkable how many seem to disregard their children’s profound attachment to their grandparents.

While this is often framed as modeling healthy boundaries and limits, one has to wonder, How healthy could it be? Is it good modeling to prize your feelings so much that you’ll sacrifice your children’s relationship on the altar of that aspiration? Is it a strength not to be able to separate your child’s needs from your own?

Does it model healthy separation to assume that your children’s mental well-being is so tied to yours that you can’t imagine that your children benefit from a relationship with your parents, even if you find that relationship upsetting or difficult? What does that teach children about the value of older people and what they might contribute to life or society?

Most of the estranged grandparents I work with are bereft and confused. Cut loose from the insulating meanings of family, they survey a world where they have no place in the greater order of things. And like so many, they want to know, “What can I do to get my grandchildren back? What if I never see them again? What can I do to end this pain?”

References

Drew, L. M., & Silverstein, M. (2007). Grandparents’ psychological well-being after loss of contact with their grandchildren. Journal of Family Psychology, 21(3), 372–379. https://doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.21.3.372

Gair, S. (2017). Missing grandchildren: Grandparents’ lost contact and implications for social work. Australian Social Work, 70(3), 263–275. https://doi.org/10.1080/0312407X.2016.1173714

Park, E.-H. (2018). For grandparents’ sake: The relationship between grandparenting involvement and psychological well-being. Ageing International, 43(3), 297–320. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12126-017-9320-8

Joshua Coleman, Ph.D., is a psychologist in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area and a Senior Fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families. He is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and chapters and has written four books: The Rules of Estrangement (Random House); When Parents Hurt: Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don’t Get Along (HarperCollins) The Marriage Makeover: Finding Happiness in Imperfect Harmony (St. Martin’s Press); and The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework (St. Martin’s Press). He is also the co-editor, along with historian Stephanie Coontz, of seven online volumes of Unconventional Wisdom: News You Can Use, a compendium of noteworthy research on the contemporary family, gender, sexuality, poverty, and work-family issues. His books have been translated into Chinese, Korean, Russian, Polish, and Croatian.

Reprinted from CCF Brief Reports

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Molly A. Martin, PhD, Department of Sociology and Criminology, The Pennsylvania State University

Birth outcomes are strongly linked to income but proving a direct cause-and-effect relationship has been challenging. Our new study, published in Demography, uses the economic boom from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale natural gas development as a “natural experiment” to examine how community-level income gains affect pregnancy behaviors and birth outcomes.

In our research examining birth outcomes before and after the Marcellus Shale boom (2007-2012), we found that a $1,000 increase in average community income led to a 1.5 percentage point decrease in low birthweight births and a 1.8 percentage point increase in expectant parents receiving adequate prenatal care. These benefits accrued across the study site and were also significant in high-poverty areas, suggesting economic development may help reduce adverse birth outcomes among high-risk, disadvantaged communities.

Our study analyzed over 78,000 births in Pennsylvania school districts above the Marcellus Shale geological formation, comparing births in areas that industry experts predicted – before the first well was drilled – to be the best for natural gas extraction with births in areas predicted to be less productive. This geological data allowed us to predict where the economic boom would be greater based on the characteristics of the underlying rock formed 39 million years ago – long before residents made choices about their health behaviors, health care and family goals.

We focus on the economic impacts of natural gas development in Pennsylvania because they were large: gains of over $14 billion between 2008 and 2010 in corporate spending, job growth, and local tax revenue. These gains were important because Pennsylvania was still recovering from the Great Recession. Yet the environmental hazards of Marcellus Shale development, like water contamination, air pollution, and forest disruption, are also important. More research is needed to examine the environmental and health risks of hydraulic fracturing and other oil and gas industry practices.

We used the geological variation of the shale to identify cause-and-effect relationships. With a pre-drilling map of the Marcellus Shale geological formation created by the oil and gas industry, we classified school districts into “treatment” and “comparison” groups based on the predicted economic value of the shale for gas production.

Among the 282 Pennsylvania school districts above the Marcellus Shale, 184 are in the treatment group and 98 are in the comparison group. Relative to the comparison districts, community income in the treatment districts increased by $1,825 per household per year. New York treatment districts did not experience these community income gains because “fracking” is banned there.

We made our causal estimates more accurate with additional steps. First, we accounted for a host of other differences between the treatment and comparison groups and changes that both groups experienced over time. Finally, we examined siblings born before and after the economic boom to control for family characteristics, like the parent’s genetic predispositions, childhood experiences, personality traits and preferences. Together, these approaches allowed us to isolate the effects of community income gains on birth outcomes.

Our findings show that community-wide income gains can improve infant birth outcomes even in the presence of potential environmental risks from natural gas development. Our research design controlled for area-wide hazardous exposures, which prior research demonstrates are harmful for infant health. Notably, we did not find greater water pollution, air pollution, or other environmental hazards in treatment districts relative to comparison districts.

This means our quasi-experimental groups based on pre-drilling information really captured potential income, not drilling itself or its repercussions. Treatment districts did receive more income, but they were just as likely as comparison districts to experience the environmental hazards associated with drilling and gas production. By design, our study was able to isolate the effect of community income gains.

Our study provides strong causal evidence that raising community-level income can lead to reduced rates of low birthweight births. This is notable because low birthweight is an important early life indicator that strongly predicts infant mortality, inhibited cognitive development, and numerous physical health challenges and diseases. In fact, low birthweight and its subsequent childhood risks have long-term consequences like lowered educational attainment, lower lifetime earnings, and shorter lifespans, which has led some scholars to speculate that low birth weight is a key mechanism in the transmission of poverty across generations.

We found that income appears to affect birth outcomes through multiple pathways beyond maternal health behaviors like smoking, gestational weight gain, and prenatal care use. Thus, our work suggests that economic development and other policies that increase community income could reduce the incidence of low birth weight and, thereby, improve population health beyond infancy.

_____________________________________

For More Information, Please Contact:

Molly A. Martin, PhD
Department of Sociology and Criminology
The Pennsylvania State University
mam68@psu.edu

Citation: Martin, M. A., Green, T. L., & Chapman, A. (2024). The Causal Effect of Increasing Area-Level Income on Birth Outcomes and Pregnancy-Related Health: Estimates from the Marcellus Shale Boom Economy. Demography 11691517.  https://doi.org/10.1215/00703370-11691517

Link: https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2025/03/05/community-income-brief-report/