Child Benefits: A Smart Investment for America’s Future

Russell Sage Foundation eBooks · 2025-01-13 · 1 citations

In July 2021, for the first time, the United States had a near-universal child benefit, providing monthly payments to almost all families with children. But after December 2021, the payments stopped. Where did this brief experiment with a child benefit in the United States come from? What do we know about the history of child benefits and how they affect children and families? Should the United States build on its experiment from 2021 and turn its child tax credit into a child benefit? This book answers these questions. The evidence from the United States is crucial but also limited, since the expanded child tax credit was only in effect temporarily and was delivered as a regular monthly payment for only six months. In addition, it was implemented during an unusual time, when the country was still experiencing the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic. These factors make it hard to predict the likely effects of a permanent child benefit in the United States based solely on evidence from the 2021 experiment. The author thus draws on a wealth of evidence from countries that have had many years of experience with child benefits.

Kindergarten instructional practices and child reading and math growth from kindergarten through third grade

Instructional Science · 2025-07-12

Cross-national Differences in Socioeconomic Achievement Inequality in Early Primary School: The Role of Parental Education and Income in Six Countries

AERA Open · 2024-01-01 · 6 citations

This paper presents comparative information on the strength of the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and literacy skills at ages 6–8, drawing on data from France, Germany, Japan, Rotterdam (Netherlands), the United Kingdom, and the United States. We investigate whether the strength of the association between SES and literacy skills in early-to-mid childhood depends on the operationalization of SES (parental education, income, or both) and whether differences in inequalities at the end of lower secondary schooling documented in international large-scale assessments are already present when children have experienced at most two years of compulsory schooling. We find marked differences in SES-related inequalities in early achievement across countries that are largely insensitive to the way SES is measured and that seem to mirror inequalities reported for older students. We conclude that country context shapes the link between parental SES and educational achievement, with country differences rooted in the early childhood period.

Transitioning to adulthood: Are conventional benchmarks as protective today as they were in the past?

Social Science Research · 2024-02-05

More young adults in the United States are studying beyond high school and working full-time than in the past, yet young adults continue to have high poverty rates as they transition to adulthood. This study uses longitudinal data on two cohorts of young adults from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth to assess whether conventional benchmarks associated with economic success—gaining an education, finding stable employment, and delaying childbirth until after marriage—are as predictive of reduced poverty today as they were in the past. We also explore differences in the protective effect of the benchmarks by race/ethnicity, gender, and poverty status while young. We find that, on average, the benchmarks associated with economic success are as predictive of reduced poverty among young adults today as they were for the prior generation; however, demographics and features of the economy have contributed to higher poverty rates among today's young adults. • Benchmarks of success are as predictive of reduced poverty today as in the past. • Achieving more benchmarks increases the likelihood of reduced young adult poverty. • Being Black and poor as a youth explain young adult poverty more than some benchmarks. • Economic changes over time contribute to higher poverty rates for young adults today.

Does Family Structure Account for Child Achievement Gaps by Parental Education? Findings for England, France, Germany and the United States

Population and Development Review · 2024-04-15 · 6 citations

Abstract This paper explores the role of family trajectories during childhood in explaining inequalities by maternal education in children's math and reading skills using harmonized, longitudinal, and nationally representative surveys, which follow children over the course of primary and lower secondary school in four high‐income countries (England, France, Germany, and the United States). As single parenthood and family transitions are more likely among less educated parents and are associated with fewer resources for children, we explore whether growing up outside a stable two‐parent family mediates educational inequalities in math and reading scores. Results show a strong educational gradient in family trajectories in the four countries, but this varies by child age and by country. Children who experience a family transition record lower test scores, although the magnitude differs by the type of postseparation arrangements. Overall, family trajectories are strongly associated with children's math and reading scores but, because of the importance of selectivity in family trajectories, they play only a modest role in explaining the skills gaps by maternal education, considerably less than determinants such as income. The penalties associated with not living within a stable two‐parent family are always larger in the United States and England than in France and Germany.

Early Effects of the New York City Paid Safe and Sick Leave Law

Journal of Public Health Management and Practice · 2023-07-24 · 4 citations

CONTEXT: Paid sick leave (PSL) is a public health strategy associated with benefits for workers, businesses, and consumers. In the absence of a federal law, in 2014, New York City (NYC) joined other state and municipal governments with local PSL policies. OBJECTIVES: To examine changes in PSL after the implementation of NYC's 2014 Paid Safe and Sick Leave Law and to assess which communities remain less likely to use PSL. DESIGN: This study uses data from multiple panels of the NYC Longitudinal Survey of Wellbeing (NYC-LSW)-a population-representative study of NYC adults-to track changes in PSL, using data collected before and after NYC's Paid Safe and Sick Leave Law was implemented. We use weighted cross-tabulations and multinomial logistic regression models to assess changes in payment for sick leave since the implementation of the law. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: The study includes 2985 NYC adults aged 18 to 64 years who reported working for pay in the year preceding the survey where PSL questions were asked (2014-2019). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Use of sick leave and payment for sick leave. RESULTS: Weighted descriptive results show a 7-percentage-point increase ( P = .02) in the rate of being paid for all sick days and a 6-percentage-point decrease ( P = .02) in not being paid for any sick days. Results from multinomial logistic regression models, adjusting for potential confounders, show that after implementation of the law, workers with low levels of education, who are younger, Latino, and foreign-born remain less likely than their peers to use PSL. CONCLUSIONS: We demonstrate that the PSL mandate expanded access for employees but not evenly across groups. These results offer guidance to other jurisdictions implementing PSL policies, suggesting the need for targeted education and enforcement efforts to ensure policies reach sectors where low-wage workers are most prevalent.

Parental Education-related Gaps in Externalising Behaviour at age 3–4 Years: Evidence from a Harmonised Framework from the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Netherlands

Child & Youth Care Forum · 2023-07-06 · 1 citations

Inequalities in Resources for Preschool-Age Children by Parental Education: Evidence from Six Advanced Industrialized Countries

European Journal of Population / Revue européenne de Démographie · 2023-12-01 · 8 citations

This paper provides new evidence on inequalities in resources for children age 3-4 by parental education using harmonized data from six advanced industrialized countries-United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Netherlands, and Japan-that represent different social welfare regime types. We analyze inequalities in two types of resources for young children-family income, and center-based child care-applying two alternative measures of parental education-highest parental education, and maternal education. We hypothesize that inequalities in resources by parental education will be less pronounced in countries where social policies are designed to be more equalizing. The results provide partial support for this hypothesis: the influence of parental education on resources for children does vary by the social policy context, although not in all cases. We also find that the measurement of parental education matters: income disparities are smaller under a maternal-only definition whereas child care disparities are larger. Moreover, the degree of divergence between the two sets of estimates differs across countries. We provide some of the first systematic evidence about how resources for young children vary depending on parents' education and the extent to which such inequalities are buffered by social policies. We find that while early inequalities are a fact of life in all six countries, the extent of those inequalities varies considerably. Moreover, the results suggest that social policy plays a role in moderating the influence of parental education on resources for children.

State-level variation in the cumulative prevalence of child welfare system contact, 2015–2019

Children and Youth Services Review · 2023-02-04 · 37 citations

The relevance of tracking and social school composition for growing achievement gaps by parental education in lower secondary school: a longitudinal analysis in France, Germany, the United States, and England

European Sociological Review · 2023-12-08 · 7 citations

Abstract There is substantial variation in the degree of social stratification in students’ achievement across countries. However, most research is based on cross-sectional data. In this study, we evaluate the importance of social origin, namely, parents’ education, for achievement inequalities during lower secondary school using recent longitudinal microdata form the French Direction de l’Evaluation de la Prospective et de la Performance panel, the German National Educational Panel Study, the US-American Early Childhood Longitudinal Study 1998, and the British Millennium Cohort Study. We evaluate whether country differences can be attributed to different tracking systems or the social composition of schools. We find substantial SES gaps in math achievement progress in all four countries but more pronounced gaps in England and Germany. Yet, within-school SES gaps are similar across countries suggesting that the allocation of students to schools drives country differences. Moreover, we find that between-school tracking in Germany accounts for a large share of the SES gaps, whereas course-by-course tracking seems less important in the other countries. The role of schools’ social composition is similar across countries.