Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations?

6. Dads and Neighborhoods: Their Contributions to Children’s Success

Chapter 6 Dads and Neighborhoods: Their Contributions to Children’s Success he central concerns of this book are the role that college plays in increasing women’s chances of success, and the spillover from a mother’s college education to her children’s achievement. In pursuing these topics, however, we need to remain aware of what other factors besides maternal education affect children’s well-being: matters such as marital stability and family structure, household income, and neighborhood. These other factors might become confused or conflated with the effect of education, but by separating out the influence of each one through statistical techniques, we can better grasp its role. Equally important, some of these variables, such as marital stability and neighborhood , may be mechanisms whereby increased maternal education improves children’s outcomes, so we need to assess their importance as boosters of maternal education. In this chapter we focus on two factors that are commonly believed to be very important for children’s success: whether a child is raised jointly by the mother and father or by a mother alone, and whether the child is raised in a good residential neighborhood. Although common sense and the mass media assert that living with both parents as well as living in a safe and supportive neighborhood advantage children, social scientists are far from unanimous on the importance of these factors. Some scholars suggest that children manage just fine in mother-headed families. Other researchers question how much of a difference neighborhoods make in how kids turn out. We will discuss each of these scholarly controversies in turn, adding our own contributions, drawing upon the CUNY (City University of New York) and NLSY (the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Longitudinal Survey of Youth) surveys. How Important Is Dad? Posing this question would have been unthinkable thirty years ago. Back then, research on social mobility dwelled almost exclusively on the father’s characteristics—his education, income, and the complexity of his 126 T Dads and Neighborhoods 127 job. Scholars linked those factors to his children’s educational prospects and their occupational attainment in adulthood. It was considered selfevident that a family’s future depended on the father as the primary wage earner and “head of household.” Even though the responsibility for raising children was left almost entirely to mothers, a father’s status was considered central to children’s mobility prospects. Families, and researchers’ perspectives on them, have undergone major shifts in recent decades. In families with children under one year old, 60 percent of mothers now work for pay, double the rate of the 1970s (U.S. Census Bureau 2001). In households where both parents work, women’s earnings now constitute a bigger part of a family’s income than in years past: about one-quarter of working wives now earn more than their working husbands (U.S. Census Bureau 2004). Given this increased economic clout of women within two-parent households, it is no longer reasonable to assume that a husband’s income or occupation defines the socioeconomic status (SES) of a family, let alone determines the educational prospects of the children. Other demographic trends have drawn us even further away from a father-centered view of the family and social mobility. Divorce rates in America hit a high in the 1970s: about 40 percent of women born in the 1970s will divorce during their lifetime. In addition, 34 percent of births are currently to unwed women (Martin, Park, and Sutton 2002). Divorce plus out-of-wedlock births jointly contribute to large numbers of children being raised solely by their mothers: about one in four American children under eighteen (and nearly half of all African American children) currently live with their mother without a father present (Fields 2004). Even more children live in a mother-headed household at some time in their formative years. Given these trends, we decided to reverse the father-centered perspective on intergenerational mobility, and instead ask: How important are fathers for their children’s success, over and above the contributions of the mother? What is the value added of having a father in the home? After examining whether a two-parent family structure improves children ’s chances of success, we next ask what it is about a father’s presence that makes a difference for children. Do dual-parent families rear their children differently than families headed by a single mother? Is it the added income that a father contributes to the household...