Thinking about Parenthood
Protective role of parenthood on age-related brain function in mid- to late-life
Edwina Orchard et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 4 March 2025
Abstract:
The experience of human parenthood is near ubiquitous and can profoundly alter one's body, mind, and environment. However, we know very little about the long-term neural effects of parenthood for parents themselves, or the implications of pregnancy and caregiving experience on the aging adult brain. Here, we investigate the link between the number of children parented and age on brain function in 19,964 females and 17,607 males from the UK Biobank. In both females and males, parenthood was positively correlated with functional connectivity, such that higher number of children parented was associated with higher connectivity, particularly within the somato/motor network. Critically, the spatial topography of parenthood-linked effects was inversely correlated with the impact of age on functional connectivity across the brain for both females and males, such that the connections that were positively correlated with number of children were negatively correlated with age. This result suggests that a higher number of children is associated with patterns of brain function in the opposite direction to age-related alterations. Overall, these results indicate that the changes accompanying parenthood may confer benefits to brain health across the lifespan, altering aging trajectories, consistent with animal models of parenthood and preliminary findings of "younger-looking" brain structure in human parents. Observing this effect in both females and males implicates the caregiving environment, rather than pregnancy alone, and highlights the importance of future work to disentangle the underlying mechanisms related to the direct impact of caregiving, the indirect impact of the environment, and the result of covarying sociodemographic factors.
Ease of retrieval of role attributes predicts role clarity which, in turn, predicts outcomes among stepparents
Erica Slotter & Hanna Campbell
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, May 2025
Abstract:
Stepfamilies are a common familial structure in the United States; however, members of stepfamilies are at risk for various adverse outcomes. The present research sought to examine the experiences of stepparents as one window into stepfamily functioning. Past research suggests that a lack of stepparent role clarity correlates with lower overall identity clarity and worse personal and relational well-being evaluations. The current work utilized an ease of retrieval manipulation to reduce stepparent role clarity across two studies of stepparents (total N = 545). Manipulated role clarity predicted reduced self-concept clarity, personal well-being evaluations, romantic relationship evaluations, and quality of stepparent-stepchild relationships. Furthermore, reduced role clarity mediated direct associations between the manipulation and outcomes of interest. Taken together, these findings demonstrate causal connections between stepparents knowing their role within their families and more positive personal and relational well-being outcomes, suggesting that role clarity might be one pathway to promoting stable, functional stepfamilies.
Reproductive Technology and the Child Care Sector: How Access to Oral Contraception and Abortion Shaped Workforce Composition and Quality
Chris Herbst & Erdal Tekin
NBER Working Paper, February 2025
Abstract:
The composition and quality of the child care workforce may be uniquely sensitive to changes in the complementarities between home production and market work. This paper examines whether the expansion of oral contraceptives and abortion access throughout the 1960's and 1970's influenced the composition, quality, and wages of the child care workforce. Leveraging state-by-birth cohort variation in access to these reproductive technologies, we find that they significantly altered the educational profile of child care workers---increasing the proportion of less-educated women in the sector while reducing the share of highly-educated workers. This shift led to a decline in average education levels and wages within the child care workforce. Furthermore, access to the pill and abortion influenced child care employment differently across settings, with center-based providers losing more high-skilled workers to alternatives with better career opportunities, and home-based and private household providers absorbing more low-skilled women, for whom child care may have remained a viable employment destination. Overall, our findings indicate that increased reproductive autonomy, while expanding women's access to higher-skilled and -paying professions, also resulted in a redistribution of skilled labor away from child care, which may have implications for service quality, child development, and parental employment.
Priming Parental Identity: Evidence from Experimental Data
Daniela Bresciani et al.
University of Chicago Working Paper, February 2025
Abstract:
Identity is a person's sense of self, rooted in affiliations with social groups. It carries behavioral prescriptions and shapes decision-making. Only salient identities weigh in the decision-making at a given moment partially due to people's inattention to all their identities. Priming one identity over others can shift perceived payoffs to decisions and affect decisionmaking. This paper aims to understand how priming parental identity affects parents' decisionmaking among low-income parents with young children. In two different experiments, we prompt parents via text message to redeem the unredeemed gift card they owned for participating in past research studies. Results from these two experiments show: (1) a prompt highlighting what parents could purchase for their children with the gift card significantly increased the redemption rate by 45% compared to a generic reminder to redeem the gift card; (2) a prompt highlighting what parents could purchase for their children significantly increased the redemption rate by 39% compared to a message encouraging parents to think about what they could buy for themselves. Neither study has heterogeneity in treatment impact, aligning with the fact that parents value parental identity in all backgrounds. We interpret these treatment effects as the result of priming the parental identity and altering parental decision-making. Our findings underscore the importance of highly valued and salient identities in shaping decision-making.
Temperature and Maltreatment of Young Children
Mary Evans, Ludovica Gazze & Jessamyn Schaller
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We estimate the impacts of temperature on alleged and substantiated child maltreatment among young children using administrative data from state child protective services agencies. Leveraging short-term weather variation, we find increases in the number of young children involved in cases of alleged and substantiated maltreatment during hot periods. Additional analysis identifies neglect as the temperature-sensitive maltreatment type, and we find some evidence that adaptation via air conditioning mitigates this relationship. Given that climate change will increase exposure to extreme temperatures, our findings speak to additional costs of climate change among the most vulnerable.