Compared to unpaid leave, paid family leave may better help working parents balance the competing needs of job and family early in a child's life, among other advantages. Yet the United States remains one of only two countries in the world without a statutory national paid maternity leave policy, and one of the only high-income countries that…

Alleviating disadvantage in low-income environments predicts higher cognitive abilities during early childhood. It is less established whether family income continues to predict cognitive growth in later childhood or whether there may even be bidirectional dynamics. Notably, living in poverty may moderate income-cognition dynamics. In this study,…

Relations between paternal autonomy support and four aspects of adolescent social competence and responsibility at age 16 were examined using data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. With controls on maternal autonomy support, significant relations were observed between paternal autonomy support and three of the four…

Community studies indicating that affluence has social-emotional consequences for youth have conflated family and neighborhood wealth. We examined adolescent boys' delinquency and adolescent girls' anxiety-depression as a function of family, neighborhood, and cumulative affluence in a sample that is primarily of European-American descent, but…

Effortful control (EC) refers to the ability to inhibit a dominant response to perform a subdominant one and has been shown as protective against a myriad of difficulties. Research examining precursors of EC has been limited to date, and in this study, infancy contributors to toddler EC were examined. Specifically, parent/family background…

Analysis of 1990 census data for Washington found that income for both Hispanic and White female heads of families was most strongly related to employment variables (hours worked and occupational status); was less related to age, education, or presence of young children; and was little related to marital status, citizenship status, or English…