https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

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From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(10)60518-1.pdf

Maternal mortality for 181 countries, 1980-2008: a systematic analysis of progress towards Millennium Development Goal 5.

Maternal mortality: who, when, where, and why

J. C. Caldwells 1979 paper on Nigeria suggested several pathways whereby the mothers education might enhance child survival. The World Fertility Survey (WFS) program considerably increased knowledge about the links between maternal education and child survival during the 1980s. Some of the areas improved by maternal education included cleanliness health services utilization child quality and the empowerment of women. Life events of the mother also exerted child survival effects: e.g. prenatal care vaccination for tetanus and type of assistance at delivery. Large differences according to maternal education were found for prenatal care in Bolivia and Egypt but there was much less difference in Kenya according to Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data. Educated women were much more likely to be attended by a trained person at delivery. Tetanus immunization differentials were small for Egypt and Kenya but substantial for Bolivia. Several multivariate analyses for 25 DHS surveys indicated that the odds of dying before age 2 for a child born to a mother with 7 or more years of education were only 42.5% compared with the children of uneducated mothers. The association of child survival with maternal education was weaker in sub-Saharan African countries possibly attributable to greater female autonomy child fostering and extreme hardship. Another analysis covering 17 DHS surveys and ages 1-24 months found that neonatal mortality was less sensitive to maternal education than mortality in the next 23 months. Stunting in early life was strongly related to maternal education but not as strongly as mortality at age 1-24 months. Maternal education was also strongly associated with immunization coverage and children of uneducated mothers were far less likely to be immunized. In addition diarrhea was at least 20% higher among children of uneducated mothers while more educated mothers were more likely to utilize health services for childhood diseases.

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Women's Education, Child Welfare and Child Survival: A Review of the Evidence

In this paper we examine the relative importance of a number of demographic determinants of infant and early child mortality using information from 39 World Fertility Survey countries. We include sex of the child, age of the mother at the time of the birth, birth order, mother's educational level and a number of indicators of spacing of adjacent births among the correlates of chances of survival for children below the age of five years. Mortality of firstborn children and of those born to teenage mothers is shown to be higher than average; that of later children and those of older mothers was not much higher than average, once other factors are controlled. Effects of poor birth-spacing persist even after other factors have been controlled, and are similar where a sib was born during the two years preceding the birth of the child, regardless of the survival status of that sib; however, mortality was higher when that sib had died, due to increased familial risks of mortality. Rapid subsequent births also ra...

Demographic Determinants of Infant and Early Child Mortality: A Comparative Analysis

Using results from the World Fertility Survey (WFS) for 28 countries, socioeconomic differences in neonatal, postneonatal, and child mortality were examined. To maintain some degree of comparability and to make presentation of the results feasible, focus was on 5 variables which are available for each survey. It can be argued that each of the 5 socioeconomic variables considered here--mother's education, mother's work status since marriage, current or most recent husband of mother's occupation and education, and current type of place of residence of mother--affects infant and child mortality, although often as surrogates for other variables which were usually not directly available. For over 24 countries, the neonatal mortality rate varied from 84 in Nepal to 15 in Malaysia. In Nepal the rate for children of the skilled and unskilled was high (124) but where the husband had received 7 or more years of education the rate of 54 was low. At the other extreme, rates in Malaysia varied from 5 when mother's had 7 or more years of education to 23 for offspring of the least educated husbands. The highest overall postneonatal rate of 89 was again found in Nepal and the lowest national rate in Trinidad and Tobago at 13. In 9 out of 24 countries the high values were over 3 times as great as the low values and the absolute difference exceeded 30/1000 in 13 countries. Differences on child mortality are substantial, reflecting the greater influence of socioeconomic factors on mortality in early childhood. Nationally, the values ranged from 186 in Senegal to a low of 8 in Trinidad and Tobago. In only Haiti, Guyana, and Pakistan did the ratio of the maximum to the minimum rates for sizeable groups fall below 2. At the other extreme, in 5 countries the ratio exceeded 10 and in a further 6 was above 4. Differences between the high and low groups within countries exceeded 30 in 18 out of 28 countries and were over 50 in 10 of these. In 9 countries the highest rates occurred among mothers with no education and in a further 6 among husbands with no education. Education of mother, followed by education of her husband and his occupation were generally the strongest explanatory variables. The work status of the mother was not likely to be an important explanatory variable in these analyses. Results of a multivariate analysis suggested intriguing differences in the relative roles of different socioeconomic variables. Mother's education seemed to play an important role in determining children's chances of surviving in several Latin American and South East Asian countries. In no country did husband's level of education appear in all 3 models. The occupation of the husband was possibly the purest indicator of socioeconomic status, and this factor appeared in the models for all 3 segments of infant and child mortality. Mother's work status appeared least often.

Socio-economic factors in Infant and child mortality: A cross-national comparison

Childhood poverty and early parenthood are both high on the political agenda. The key new issue addressed in this research is the relative importance of childhood poverty and of early motherhood as correlates of outcomes later in life. How far are the 'effects' of early motherhood on later outcomes due to childhood precursors, especially experience of childhood poverty? If there are powerful associations of both childhood poverty and early parenthood with later adult outcomes, there are a number of subsidiary questions relating to the magnitude of these associations, the particular threshold levels of childhood poverty that prove most critical, and whether it is, as often assumed, only teenage mothers who are subsequently disadvantaged, or also those who have their first birth in their early twenties? The source of data for this study is the National Child Development Study. We examine a range of outcomes at age 33 in a number of domains representing different aspects of adult social exclusion, including: welfare, socio-economic, physical health, and emotional well-being, as well as demographic behaviour. We control for a wide range of childhood factors: poverty; social class of origin and of father; mother's and father's school leaving age; family structure; housing tenure; mother's and father's interest in education; personality attributes; performance on educational tests; and contact with the police by age 16. We show that there are clear associations for the adult outcomes with age at first birth, even after controlling for childhood poverty and a wide range of other childhood background factors. Moreover, we demonstrate that the widest gulf in adult outcomes occurs for those who enter motherhood early (before age 23), though further reinforced for teenage motherhood for most adult outcomes. We also show that it is any experience of childhood poverty that is most clearly associated with adverse outcomes in adulthood, with additional reinforcement for highe

Childhood Poverty, Early Motherhood and Adult Social Exclusion

Narrowly defined, demography deals with the measurement of vital events (birth, death, and marriage) and migration, studies the factors that influence the rate at which those events occur, and, to a lesser extent, investigates the consequences of the patterns of these events. In this paper, we adopt this narrow definition of the field and consider only the first three events so that by limiting the scope of our review, we can examine these selected topics in detail.

John Hobcraft

Papers

Women's Education, Child Welfare and Child Survival: A Review of the Evidence

Demographic Determinants of Infant and Early Child Mortality: A Comparative Analysis

Socio-economic factors in Infant and child mortality: A cross-national comparison

Childhood Poverty, Early Motherhood and Adult Social Exclusion

Age, period, and cohort effects in demography: a review.