Family Socioeconomic Status as a Moderator of Parental Unemployment and Children’s Educational Attainment

• In Event: 127 - Section on Inequality, Poverty and Mobility Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Paper Session: Table 03. Educational Inequality

Abstract

Prior research on parental unemployment has paid little explicit attention to role family socioeconomic status (SES) plays in potentially moderating the impact of a parent’s job loss on children (see Newman 1988 for an exception.). Family SES likely moderates the effect of parental unemployment, since higher SES families generally have more resources (both economic and non-economic, such as social net-works) to cope with the unemployment spell. In this paper, I bring a stratification perspective to re-search on parental unemployment and children’s educational attainment. To do so, I ask: How does family socioeconomic status moderate the impact of parental unemployment on children’s educational outcomes? More specifically, I examine differences in educational attainment for children who experience parental job loss from different family SES backgrounds. I also examine the educational attainment of children born into socioeconomically similar families but with divergent experiences related to parental job loss.

Author

• Caren Arbeit, University of Minnesota