Smart Parenting
Socioeconomic status and academic achievement: Developmental pathways through parenting and children’s executive functions
Nicholas Waters, Sammy Ahmed & Pamela Davis-Kean
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, December 2025
Abstract:
The influences of child, family, and socioeconomic factors on children’s early academic development are best understood within the context of one another. Yet, most existing studies have focused primarily on either family- or child-level factors, such as parental influences or child executive functions, in explaining socioeconomic inequalities in children’s academic achievement. In an attempt to integrate these two lines of research, the current investigation simultaneously examined the specific contextual and cognitive pathways that underlie associations between socioeconomic factors and children’s early academic achievement using data from a prospective longitudinal study conducted at 10 sites across the United States (N = 1,364). Findings revealed that after controlling for a host of potentially confounding influences, parent education, but not family income-to-needs, was linked to children’s math achievement indirectly via sequential paths that included both parenting factors -- maternal sensitivity and cognitive stimulation -- and children’s working memory skills. Likewise, parent education was predictive of children’s reading achievement indirectly via paths that included cognitive stimulation and working memory. Finally, independent of child executive functions, parent education was also indirectly related to children’s reading achievement via cognitive stimulation and to children’s math achievement via maternal sensitivity. Together, these findings shed light on the specific contextual and cognitive mechanisms that underlie socioeconomic-related differences in children’s early academic skills and provide potential insights for policies and interventions aimed at closing the achievement gap.
Brain Changes After a Parenting Intervention in Adolescent Girls With Internalizing Symptoms: A Randomized Clinical Trial
Sylvia Lin et al.
JAMA Pediatrics, forthcoming
Design, Setting, and Participants: This randomized clinical trial was conducted from April 2022 to June 2024. Participants were mother-daughter dyads, with daughters aged 10 to 12 years who scored above the 50th percentile on the Revised Children’s Anxiety and Depression Scale. Adolescents completed functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at baseline and 6-month follow-up.
Intervention: Manualized Tuning In to Teens (TINT) intervention was delivered 1:1 to mothers in 8 weekly sessions.
Results: Of the 70 female adolescents and their mothers included, 35 were randomized to parenting intervention (mean [SD] adolescent age, 11.4 [0.7] years), and 35 were randomized to a waitlist control group (mean [SD] adolescent age, 11.5 [0.8] years). Adolescents whose mothers received the intervention exhibited increased activation in the superior frontal gyrus (SFG) during implicit emotion regulation (B = 1.75; 95% CI, 0.95-2.54; family-wise error [FWE] P = .002) and decreased activation in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) during explicit emotion regulation (B = −1.63; 95% CI, −2.43 to −0.84; FWE P = .03) compared with controls. Changes in SFG and IFG activation were associated with reductions in unsupportive maternal emotion socialization of sadness (Pearson r = −0.50; false discovery rate [FDR] P <.001) and anxiety (Pearson r = −0.38; FDR P = .009), and reductions in adolescent anxiety (Pearson r = 0.34; FDR P = .02) and internalizing symptoms (Pearson r = 0.32; FDR P = .03), respectively.
Is Video Watching Bad for Kids? The Effect of Video Watching on Children's Skills
Carolina Caetano et al.
NBER Working Paper, November 2025
Abstract:
This paper documents video consumption among school-aged children in the U.S. and explores its impact on human capital development. Video watching is common across all segments of society, yet surprisingly little is known about its developmental consequences. With a bunching identification strategy, we find that an additional hour of daily video consumption has a negative impact on children’s noncognitive skills, with harmful effects on both internalizing behaviors (e.g., depression) and externalizing behaviors (e.g., social difficulties). We find a positive effect on math skills, though the effect on an aggregate measure of cognitive skills is smaller and not statistically significant. These findings are robust and largely stable across most demographics and different ways of measuring skills and video watching. We find evidence that for Hispanic children, video watching has positive effects on both cognitive and noncognitive skills -- potentially reflecting its role in supporting cultural assimilation. Interestingly, the marginal effects of video watching remain relatively stable regardless of how much time children spend on the activity, with similar incremental impacts observed among those who watch very little and those who watch for many hours.
Unexpected Changes in Rural Families: Fewer Married Parents, Lower Child Poverty
Matthew Brooks & Shelley Clark
Journal of Marriage and Family, forthcoming
Methods: Current Population Survey data are used to estimate rural and urban trends in family structures and child poverty, using the Supplemental Poverty Measure, from 2000 to 2023. Logistic regressions test whether the poverty penalties associated with living in four kinds of nonmarital families (cohabiting, formerly married, never married, and kinship care) have changed for rural and urban children over this period.
Results: By 2023, significantly more rural (37.9%) than urban (32.5%) children lived in nonmarital families; simultaneously, rural poverty rates declined significantly. Further, although rural children living in nonmarital families faced greater poverty penalties than urban children in 2000–2003, by 2020–2023 these penalties had diminished substantially for both rural and urban children, and the elevated poverty penalties for rural children had disappeared.
Assisted Housing and Healthy Child Development
Sandra Newman & Scott Holupka
Journal of Housing Economics, December 2025
Abstract:
Housing affordability is the most prevalent housing problem jeopardizing the well-being of low-income children. In this paper, we attempt to estimate the net effects of the affordability feature of assisted housing on children’s healthy development measured by cognitive achievement, overall health and socioemotional adjustment. Using a quasi-experimental design, we focus on children ages 0-17 using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics address-matched to HUD administrative data, enriched with multiply imputed housing and neighborhood measures from the AHS and linked to census tract measures via geocodes. Methodological innovations include estimating a series of treatment strategies to address the positivity assumption that the comparison group is always income-eligible for assistance and addressing likely crossovers by estimating a series of target trials. We use two methods, Oster’s delta and VanderWeele’s E-value, to test the robustness of results. We find that children who spend part of childhood in assisted housing have greater cognitive achievement and better overall health compared to their unassisted counterparts. Assisted housing also improves children’s socioemotional adjustment indirectly by improving parenting quality, which, in turn, improves child adjustment. Affordability appears to drive results.
U.S. men’s testosterone (T), partnering, and residence with children: Evidence from a nationally-representative cohort (NHANES) and relevance to clinically low T
Lee Gettler & Sarah Hoegler Dennis
Psychoneuroendocrinology, December 2025
Abstract:
Men who are in committed partnerships and fathers who are involved with caregiving often have lower testosterone than their peers. Most prior studies of human paternal psychobiology have focused on families with infants and young children, often with relatively small sample sizes. This has left a number of important questions relatively unresolved regarding how men’s testosterone varies based on life history status (partnering and parenting) as they age and their family demographics change. Moreover, variation in testosterone based on partnering and parenting may have implications for men’s health, including their likelihood of having clinically low testosterone. Here, we combined data from three waves of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to address these questions in a large, U.S.-population representative sample (N=4903). We stratified men according to whether they were partnered and living with younger (0-5 years old) versus older (6-17 years old) children, respectively. Using serum total testosterone data assayed via liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry, we found that partnered men had lower testosterone than single men not residing with children, regardless of whether partnered men resided with one or more young children. In contrast, partnered men residing with two or more older children had significantly lower testosterone than single men and partnered men who did not reside with children. We did not find that partnered men or those residing with children had increased risk of clinically low testosterone compared to single men not living with children. This suggests that variation in U.S. men’s testosterone based on family characteristics does not significantly affect their risks for clinically low testosterone. Our results showing lower testosterone in partnered men living with older children suggest the possibility of fatherhood-related regulation of testosterone as families mature, which has received little attention.