Residential Mobility, Family Dynamics, and Effects on Children and Adults

• In Event: Spatial Inequality

Abstract

Neighborhoods provide resources and opportunities that shape children’s long-term economic mobility. As such, scholars have examined policy efforts that help low-income families move into high-SES neighborhoods as an intervention strategy to promote upward social mobility. However, past research on residential mobility interventions has documented that when families relocate to higher-opportunity areas, parents benefit less than their children do from their new neighborhoods. While existing explanations of parents’ and children’s divergent socioeconomic benefits from moves to higher-SES areas have primarily focused on their varying exposures to resources and opportunities in new neighborhoods, few have explored how moves to higher-SES neighborhoods affect the within-family dynamics that may shape parents’ and children’s discrepant socioeconomic trajectories. To fill this gap, this paper uses longitudinal interview data from the Creating Moves to Opportunities (CMTO) intervention to examine low-SES parents’ and children’s experiences following their moves into high-SES neighborhoods. Our findings reveal a process in which: 1) parents believed new opportunity neighborhoods would promote their children’s futures, and they increased their involvement in their children's education post-move; 2) new opportunity neighborhoods inspired new career goals for parents, which cost additional time to pursue on top of prioritizing their children's pursuits; 3) in high-SES neighborhoods, childcare was more expensive and inaccessible, and families were separated from networks in former neighborhoods that could have provided childcare; 4) parents navigated the parent-child tradeoffs by sacrificing their own career pursuits in order to maintain children’s new, improved educational outcomes. These findings show within-family dynamics emerging from new neighborhood contexts as a pathway through which housing mobility interventions, and neighborhood contexts in general, shape divergent socioeconomic attainment trajectories across generations.

Authors

• Stefanie Ann DeLuca, Johns Hopkins University

• Yingjian Liang, Johns Hopkins University

• Angelica Yu Qin, Johns Hopkins University / School of Arts & Sciences