Mother's Education After Childbearing and Family Well-being

描述（由申请人提供）：关于优势代际传递的奖学金一直记录着父母的教育与孩子的学术技能和成果之间的联系。在这一传统中，最近的研究强调了父母教育对儿童健康的贡献。该项目整合并推进了这两方面的研究。它通过研究增加人口弱势群体（即低收入/受教育程度低的妇女）母亲的生育后教育是否能改善其子女的健康和与健康有关的结果（即预测其子女成年后健康状况的儿童能力，如认知或社会心理功能）来实现这一目标。这个研究问题反映了最近的一个人口统计学现象，即美国有孩子的弱势妇女重新进入高等教育体系。然而，与那些在生育前完成学业的母亲不同，这些女性接受额外的教育是否能改善她们孩子的福祉，人们知之甚少。因此，当前和未来支持弱势母亲成人教育的政策的价值也不清楚——这是一种广泛讨论的限制下一代不平等的方法。为了回答这个与政策相关的问题，目前的项目追求三个目标，旨在梳理出可能威胁到研究结果有效性（例如，选择偏差）和普遍性（例如，母亲种族/民族的差异）的因素，以及它们为政策提供信息的能力。第一个目的是描述重返学校的母亲的生命历程特征（例如种族/民族、婚姻史），以及不同的继续教育模式（例如完成学位）在多大程度上因母亲的特征而有所不同。第二个是确定额外的生育后教育（以年数和学位计算）是否与儿童健康和健康相关的结果呈正相关，同时评估母亲重返学校是否在短期内对儿童的福祉产生负面影响。第三个目标是确定将母亲的额外教育与儿童的长期结果联系起来的机制（例如，母亲的劳动力结果、养育行为），并评估这些联系在不同人口群体（例如，按种族/民族定义）中的稳健性。这些目标将通过利用两个互补的国家纵向数据来源，即1979年全国青年纵向调查和脆弱家庭和儿童福利研究，以及人口统计学（目标1中的生命表分析和风险模型），计量经济学（目标2中的工具变量和固定效应方法）和路径分析技术（目标3中的中介测试，多组建模）的组合来实现。该项目的研究结果旨在就母亲在生育后接受的学校教育与子女的学业成绩之间的联系提供有因果关系的有力结论，为跨代政策提供信息，并将教育和人口健康方面的公共和学术辩论联系起来。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Scholarship on the intergenerational transmission of advantage has consistently documented a connection between parents' education and their children's academic skills and outcomes. In this tradition, more recent research has emphasized the contribution of parents' education to children's health. This project integrates and advances both strands of this scholarship. It does so by examining whether increases in the post-childbearing education of mothers from disadvantaged segments of the population (i.e., women with low-income/low-levels of education) can improve the health and health-related outcomes (i.e., child competencies that forecast health in adulthood, such as cognition or psychosocial functioning) of their children. This research question reflects a recent demographic phenomenon, the reentry of disadvantaged women with children in the U.S. into the system of higher education. Yet little is known about whether the additional schooling of such women, who are different from mothers that completed their education pre-fertility, improves the wellbeing of their children. As such, the value of current and future policies that support the adult education of disadvantaged mothers-a widely discussed approach to limiting inequality in the next generation-are also unclear. To answer this policy-relevant question, the current project pursues three aims that are designed to tease out factors that may threaten to the validity (e.g., selectio bias) and generalizability (e.g., variability by mothers' race/ethnicity) of the study's findings, nd their power to inform policy. The first aim is to describe the life course characteristics (e.g., race/ethnicity, marital history) of mothers who return to school and the extent to which different patterns of continuing education (e.g., completed degrees) vary by mothers' characteristics. The second is to determine if additional post-fertility education (in years and degrees) is positively associated with children's health and health-related outcomes, while assessing whether mothers' school reentry has negative implications for children's wellbeing in the short-term. The third aim is to identify the mechanisms (e.g., maternal labor force outcomes, parenting behaviors) linking mothers' additional schooling and children's long-term outcomes and assess the robustness of these linkages across different demographic groups (e.g., defined by race/ethnicity). These aims will be accomplished by drawing on two complimentary sources of national longitudinal data, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, and a combination of demographic (life table analyses and hazard models in Aim 1), econometric (instrumental variables and fixed effects approaches in Aim 2), and path analysis techniques (tests of mediation, multi-group modeling in Aim 3). The findings from this project aspire to provide causally robust conclusions about the links between mothers' post-fertility schooling and children's outcomes in ways that inform policies that span generations and connect public and academic debates in education and population health.