Children’s family complexity
In this project we conceptualize childhood complexity based on the family lives of children’s parents and reveal how family complexity evolves dynamically over the life course. First, we introduce the concept and measurement of family life course complexity. For this, we test different concepts of family complexity. Second, we show how life course variation in the family complexity of adults and children has developed over cohorts. Third, we assess the impact of dynamic family complexity on children’s outcomes, such as education or mental health.
Published
Cohort Change in the Family Complexity of Adults and Children
With Zachary Van Winkle
Although research on the complexity of family lives is motivated by its potential consequences for children, few studies have assessed to what extent children have been exposed to increased family complexity. We address how family complexity evolved over the life course of adults in the United Kingdom, how it varied by birth cohort, gender, and parenthood status, and most importantly, how it varied across the early life courses of children by birth cohort. Although research on the complexity of family lives is motivated by its potential consequences for children, few studies have assessed to what extent children have been exposed to increased family complexity. We used rich retrospective UKHLS and BHPS data to reconstruct the family histories of adults born across the twentieth century and calculate life course complexity. We then transposed parents’ family sequences to reflect what their children experienced in their first 16 years of life. Our methodological approach provides a broader and more dynamic measure for children’s family life complexity compared to measures used in previous studies, such as a simple count of household transitions. We found an overall increase in life course family complexity over cohorts. Mothers had the most complex family life courses, followed by fathers, childless women and, lastly, childless men. However, differences between parents and childless adults converged across cohorts. By changing the perspective from parents to children, we revealed that children’s family complexity increased dramatically across birth cohorts. The two most recent cohorts of children experienced a considerably higher number of family transitions and greater family unpredictability at young ages compared to older cohorts. We provide conceptual and methodological contributions to spur future research on the consequences of increasing family complexity for children.
Work in progress
Rethinking Children’s Family Complexity: A Multi-Conceptual Approach with Dynamic Sequence Analysis and Fixed Effects Models
With Martin Gädecke & Zachary Van Winkle
Objective: The association between a wide range of family complexity indicators and children’s educational outcomes was assessed. Background: Previous research documented a negative impact of disadvantageous family transitions and family instability on children’s educational outcomes. However, there is a theoretical and empirical debate surrounding the most appropriate measure of family complexity during childhood. Method: Numerous theoretically conceptualized sequence-based complexity measures are applied to parents’ life history data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, which were linked to children’s test scores in the National Pupils Dataset. Average within-child change in boys’ and girls’ math and English tests scores following change in mothers’ and fathers’ family complexity were estimated with fixed-effects regressions.
Results: Family complexity measures were largely found to be negatively associated with children’s academic performance, however with differences across indicators. The number of transitions as well as the uncertainty and sum of disadvantage indicators were most tightly associated with children’s test scores. In addition, results varied by parents’ and children’s gender. For example, family complexity for fathers was often positively associated with children’s educational outcomes and associations were often stronger for boys compared to girls. Conclusion: Findings highlight the importance of theoretically derived measures of family complexity. In this study, measures associated with family instability and parental absence were shown to be most strongly linked with children’s educational outcomes.
Family Environments and Children’s Mental Health: A Holistic Examination Across Five Perspectives
With Lauren Bishop, Philipp Dierker, Martin Gädecke, Zachary Van Winkle, Pekka Martikainen, Liina Junna
Family life has a crucial impact on children’s wellbeing. Studies often rely on single events like union dissolution or the number of transitions or family structure types. However, recent literature calls for more comprehensive approaches that capture the complex and dynamic nature of family environments. Using Finnish population data, we address this need by applying a recently developed conceptualization of family complexity to five distinct dimension of family lives: parental partnership states, sibling complexity, parental family structure, other adult’s household structure, and residential moves. This enables us to disentangle how distinct concepts of family complexity differ across different dimensions of family lives across the childhood. Preliminary results show that family complexity differ largely across socioeconomic background of children, and the temporal dynamics and levels of the gaps differ across family dimensions and complexity measures. As next step we include the family measures complexity in individual Fixed-Effects models to assess the impact of different complexity facets of different family dimensions on children’s mental health.