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了父母的教育与子女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的教育对儿童健康的贡献。该项目整合和推进这两个奖学金的链。它通过审查来自人口中弱势群体的母亲（即，低收入/低教育水平的妇女）可以改善健康和与健康有关的结果（即，儿童能力，预测成年后的健康，如认知或心理社会功能）。这个研究问题反映了最近的一个人口现象，即美国有孩子的弱势妇女重新进入高等教育系统。然而，这些妇女与在生育前完成教育的母亲不同，她们接受更多的教育是否会改善其子女的福祉，人们对此知之甚少。因此，支持弱势母亲成人教育的当前和未来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，旨在梳理可能威胁有效性的因素（例如，选择偏差）和普遍性（例如，母亲的种族/民族的差异）的研究结果，以及他们的权力，为政策提供信息。第一个目标是描述生命过程特征（例如，种族/族裔、婚姻史）以及不同的继续教育模式（例如，完成学位）因母亲的特点而异。第二是确定生育后接受更多教育（以年数和学位表示）是否与儿童的健康和健康相关成果呈正相关，同时评估母亲重返学校是否对儿童的福祉产生短期负面影响。第三个目标是确定机制（例如，母亲劳动力结果，养育行为）将母亲的额外教育和儿童的长期结果联系起来，并评估这些联系在不同人口群体中的稳健性（例如，种族/民族）。这些目标将通过利用两个互补的国家纵向数据来源来实现，即1979年国家青年纵向调查和脆弱家庭和儿童福利研究，以及人口统计数据的组合。（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）。该项目的研究结果旨在提供关于母亲生育后的教育与儿童结果之间联系的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.