Work and Family Circumstances and Child Trajectories: When (and For What) Does AFDC Receipt Matter?

This paper focuses on children's progress through middle childhood over a four year period, beginning with a synthetic cohort of children aged 6-7 and following them to ages 10-11. We have been particularly concerned with changes over time, seeking to link changing parental work and family circumstances with changes in the quality of parent-child interaction and with children's increases or decreases in behavior problems. In this preliminary set of analyses, we can take advantage of the longitudinal NLSY child data, and control for the initial level of child outcomes at the beginning of the study period. Thus, our main focus is on how temporal patterns of AFDC receipt are linked to changes in the quality of children's home environments, their reading skills, and their behavior. We ask three major questions. First, for the large sample of children aged 10 to 11 whom we have been following from ages 6-7, what are the patterns of AFDC receipt from year 1 through year 5? We describe those patterns, and correlate variations in AFDC receipt with the measures of maternal resources, work and family patterns over the same period. Second, are these patterns linked to three indicators of child outcomes: the quality of home environments, the child's reading ability, and the child's propensity to oppositional action (a subset of behavior problems), under varying controls? Third, following Greg Duncan's lead, we develop typologies that simultaneously consider AFDC receipt, family composition, mother's education, and mother's employment history. What are the frequencies of those types, and what are the linkages between these groups and the three child outcomes under varying sets of controls? This paper was presented at the Pre-Conference on Family Process and Child Development in Low Income Families, Joint Center for Poverty Research, Chicago, IL May 7-8, 1998.