Multigenerational Neighborhood Effects on Parental Educational Plans, and Child Health

This study examines how the neighborhood environments experienced over multiple generations of a family influence parents’ educational expectations and aspirations, children’s cognitive skills, and children’s health. Building on recent research showing strong continuity in neighborhood environments across generations of family members, we argue for a revised perspective on “neighborhood effects” that considers the ways in which the neighborhood environment in one generation may have a lingering impact on the next generation. Instead of traditional regression techniques that may obscure multigenerational effects of neighborhood disadvantage, we utilize newly developed methods designed to generate unbiased treatment effects when treatments and confounders vary over time. The results show strong multigenerational neighborhood effects on outcomes related to education and cognitive skills, but no statistically significant evidence for multigenerational neighborhood effects on child health outcomes. Multigenerational Neighborhood Effects on Parental Educational Plans, and Child Health Previous research examining the effect of neighborhood characteristics on child developmental and health outcomes implicitly assumes that only the child’s current neighborhood matters. For instance, observational research typically estimates the association between a child’s own neighborhood environment, often measured at a single point in time, and a given outcome of interest. Experimental research estimates the effect of a point-in-time change in the neighborhood environment on child outcomes measured over the subsequent years. These strands of research typically ignore the possibility that the neighborhood environment may have lingering effects that persist over time, and possibly across generations. This study estimates the effect on educational, cognitive, and health outcomes of exposure to poor neighborhoods over two consecutive generations of a family. In doing so we build on recent research showing that a large majority of families living in today’s poorest residential areas have lived in similarly poor areas for at least two generations (Sharkey 2008), suggesting that neighborhood inequality might best be conceptualized and studied as a multigenerational process. If parents’ neighborhood environments impact dimensions of their adult lives such as economic status, health, or parenting styles, then there is the potential for cross-generational pathways linking parents’ childhood neighborhood environments with their children’s development, a generation later. If parents and children spend their childhoods in similar neighborhood settings, there is the possibility that any impact of the neighborhood environment may be amplified due to continuity in public institutions such as schools, in cultural norms, or in exposure to toxic or violent environments. Sharkey and Elwert (2010) estimate multigenerational neighborhood effects on child cognitive skills and find that a family’s