Poverty History, Marital History, and Quality of Children's Home Environments

Analyses of the consequences of poverty often treat poor children as a single, homogeneous group. We study relations among depth or timing of poverty, mother's marital history, and quality of the home environment for children aged 6-9, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. HOME scores increased markedly with income up to three times the poverty line, particularly for cognitive stimulation. The benefits of having a married mother were larger among children who were not poor than among poor children, particularly for emotional support. Recent poverty was associated with deficits nearly as largely as long-term poverty. However, poverty early in life had no effect on HOME scores at assessment. Key Words: children, cognitive development, family structure, home environment, poverty. Many studies have documented the health and developmental disadvantages experienced by poor children in the United States (Carnegie Task Force, 1994; Duncan Klerman, 1991; Sherman, 1994). For example, developmental outcomes such as children's aptitude test scores (Baker Korenman, Miller, Luster Smith, Brooks-Gunn, Bradley, Caldwell, Garrett, Ng'andu, Miller, 1996; Smith et al., 1997). Hence the quality of the child's home environment may act as an important mediating factor between poverty and measures of child wellbeing. In addition, there are large differences in the extent of poverty according to mother's marital history (Hogan McLanahan Miller, 1996). Several studies have shown that the mother's marital status is also an important determinant of the quality of the home environment (MacKinnon, Brody, Menaghan Miller, 1996). Children whose mothers remain married throughout their early childhood have a lower risk of experiencing poverty than do children with other types of family histories. According to estimates from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), only one third of the children whose mothers were married both at the time of the child's birth and when the child was in early elementary school were poor at some time during childhood, compared with more than 90% of children with never-married mothers and 80% of children whose mothers became divorced during that interval (Miller, 1996). The high poverty rates for children of never-married mothers are a consequence of both relatively low rates of laborforce participation and lower average wages due to lower rates of school completion among these mothers (McLanahan & Casper, 1995). …