Parent Social Networks, Mental Health, and Educational Disadvantage of Children in Poverty

• In Event: 63.018 - Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

This project evaluates the promise of parent social networks for reducing social class inequality in developmental outcomes among young children, including mental health, non-cognitive skills, and cognitive ability. The project consists of three stages. In the first stage, I estimate the causal effect of one property of parent social networks—intergenerational closure—on child development outcomes for a nationally representative sample of 1st graders. Intergenerational closure refers to the level of connectedness and the social proximity among parents with children who attend the same school. To address potential confounding and selection bias, I develop a theoretically motivated propensity score model predicting levels of intergenerational closure, operationalized as how many of their child’s classmates’ parents that they know. The results suggest that intergenerational closure has a small positive effect for some, but not all, child development outcomes. Children whose parents are more socially connected tend to exhibit fewer internalizing problem behaviors and have more developed non-cognitive skills (i.e., approaches to learning, self-control, and interpersonal skills). The effects on internalizing problem behaviors are largest in high poverty schools, and the effects on non-cognitive skills are largest for children from poor families.
In the second stage of the project, I explore whether family engagement programs promote intergenerational closure for parents in a sample of 3,000 families in 52 high poverty schools enrolled in a randomized field experiment of Families and Schools Together (FAST). Though not specifically designed to build social capital, FAST is a widely implemented family engagement program that provides the foundation for developing social capital by fostering social networks from which social capital can be generated. I show that FAST successfully builds parental social capital, though a complex pattern emerges that has contradictory implications for parents: while the program successfully engages and builds strong networks for families that are initially socially isolated, program effects are largest in school communities that have large, strong parent networks to draw upon.
In the third and final stage of the project, I simulate alternative counterfactual scenarios involving the potential effects of family engagement programs on social class inequality in children’s early development. I show that, although it builds strong parent networks, implementing FAST in schools would do little to improve child development generally and its impact on social class inequality in child development would be negligible, even if the program targeted high poverty schools. While FAST increases intergenerational closure by an amount larger than average differences between middle class and poor families, the impact is not enough to significantly decrease mental health or improve non-cognitive skills. A larger increase in intergenerational closure could have significant benefits for children, but could increase social class inequality in child development outcomes.

Author

• Alyn T. McCarty, University of Wisconsin - Madison