How do Children Think about their Family’s Socioeconomic Status?

• In Event: Parents’ Contributions to Children’s and Adolescent’s Beliefs about Social Class and Economic Inequality

Abstract

A person’s perception of their own socioeconomic status (SES) has implications for a variety of life outcomes, including political and moral judgments and mental well-being. How do children first determine their own (their family’s) position in SES hierarchies?

Prior work has found that young children tend to rate their families as very high-SES (Mandalaywala, Tai, & Rhodes, 2020) but that their ratings decline over development (Amir et al., 2019; Mistry et al., 2015). In this study we aimed to investigate *why* these developmental shifts take place. We had three specific goals: First, we aimed to replicate prior findings that SES ratings decline over development. Second, we collected objective SES information from families (which prior research has not done) to confirm that these declines in ratings represented a shift from overestimating SES to more accurate estimations. Finally, we asked child participants to provide open-ended rationales for their SES ratings in order to examine what age-related changes in rationales explained age-related changes in ratings. Child participants (n = 377 4- to 10-year-olds, 52% female, 65% White) rated their family’s SES on a MacArthur Ladder Task and then provided open-ended rationales for their ratings.

Results revealed several key insights. First, young children tended to rate their families as high-SES, but their ratings declined across development, F(1,375) = 11.5, p < .001, replicating prior work. Second, by comparing children's ratings with objective SES information, we confirmed that children became less likely to overestimate their SES and more likely to accurately estimate it (Wald X2(1) = 6.1, p = .014), see Figure 1. Finally, we coded participants' rationales for various status cues (e.g., houses, material belongings, parental occupation) and also for number of things participants mentioned they did have ("haves") and the number of things they mentioned they did not have ("don't haves"). Analyses revealed that references to particular status cues (e.g., houses, material belongings) did not change over development and did not correspond with shifts in SES ratings. However, other analyses revealed that developmental shifts in SES ratings corresponded the number of children’s references to what they did not have (X2(1) = 13.4, p < .001), but not with number of references to what they did have (X2(1) = 0.35, p = .55), see Figure 2. As children grew older, they referenced more things they did not have, and mediation models confirmed that these changes in “don’t haves” fully explained changes in SES ratings (“don’t haves”: B = -.03, SE = .001, p = .04), but that changes in “haves” did not (p = .74).

Results represent the first evidence that children gain a more accurate understanding of their SES as they grow older, and they also provide an initial window into the mechanisms underlying this change: Children increasingly understand what they lack. Understanding what one lacks might be difficult for children to grasp for cognitive reasons (e.g., it is abstract, requires counterfactual reasoning) and/or for environmental reasons (e.g., socioeconomic segregation, parental messages of positivity). Social, developmental, and cognitive implications are discussed.

Authors

• Rebecca Peretz-Lange, SUNY Purchase
  Presenting Author

• Teresa Harvey, Boston University

• Peter R. Blake, Boston University