Monthly Archives: August 2014

A Two-Generation Solution to Education Disparity

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Education tends to pay off. Higher educational attainment is associated with higher earnings, lower unemployment and better health. In the Future of Children, Neeraj Kaushal explains that education also influences important lifestyle decisions such as marriage, sex, childbearing, and substance use.

Importantly, parents’ education not only affects themselves, but also affects the wellbeing of their children. Better-educated parents often pass down the tradition of education to their children along with its benefits. The intergenerational payoffs of education are persistent and perhaps even underestimated.

While some families benefit immensely from education, other families face structural obstacles to advancing their socioeconomic status via further educational attainment. Racial and ethnic disparities are apparent by education, and children with less-educated parents are less likely to succeed in school. Furthermore, Kaushal points out, the U.S. education system reinforces socioeconomic inequality across generations by spending more money on educating richer children than poorer children.

These challenges lend support to the idea of targeting education-related interventions toward less-educated parents and their children. This might be done via a two-generation approach in which parents and children are served simultaneously. While the theoretical basis for these programs is strong, the empirical evidence is only emerging. What we do know is that investing in parents is likely to have a lasting effect on children’s health and development, which in turn increases their wellbeing as adults. There is also evidence that adult offspring’s educational attainment influences the health and life expectancy of the parents, even after accounting for parents’ socioeconomic resources. This may be due to children’s knowledge of health and technology they share with their parents and having more financial means to support them. It’s arguable that investing in programs that aim to increase parents’ education and skills at the same time as they invest in children’s development could go a long way to reduce intergenerational inequality.

For more information about two-generation programs, see the Future of Children volume Helping Parents, Helping Children: Two-Generation Mechanisms.

Policy Prescriptions to Prevent Teen Pregnancy

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Most teens would probably say they don’t want to become pregnant–in fact 87% of teen pregnancies in 2001 were reportedly unintended (see Figure 1). Even though there have been tens of thousands of teen pregnancies in recent years, teen births in the US have actually declined over the last 20 years, from 61.8 live births per 1,000 females aged 15-19 years in 1991 to 29.4 in 2012. This trend, which is due to factors that include teens making more informed decisions regarding their sexual health, is encouraging and suggests we can continue to make progress in preventing teen pregnancies.

First, we need to understand what makes teens more likely to get pregnant. Isabel Sawhill, Adam Thomas, and Emily Monea, in the Future of Children, outline several plausible explanations including cultural norms of increased acceptance of premarital sex and having children outside of marriage, a lack of positive alternatives to single motherhood, an attitude of fatalism, the high cost and limited availability of contraception, lack of knowledge about contraception and reproductive health, and inconsistent or incorrect use of contraception. The authors point out that these explanations generally fall into the categories of motivation, knowledge, and access.

Next, we can examine possible solutions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released a Vital Signs brief outlining what the federal government, health care professionals, parents/caregivers, and teens can do to prevent teen pregnancy. What I like about the CDC’s suggestions is that they start where the teen is and show how adults can support teens’ healthy development. For example, professionals can encourage teens to delay sexual activity but should also encourage sexually active teens to consider the most effective methods of birth control. Parents can know where their teens are and what they are doing (isn’t there an app for that?), especially after school, and talk with their teens about sex.

Finally, are programs that promote these types of solutions worth the cost? Sawhill and colleagues, in their Future of Children article, conducted simulations of the costs and effects of policy initiatives that encouraged men to use condoms (motivation), discouraged teen sexual activity and educated participants about proper contraceptive use (knowledge), and expanding access to Medicaid-subsidized contraception (access). All three had good benefit-cost ratios, suggesting they are excellent social investments that can actually save taxpayer dollars. For more information on how to prevent teen pregnancy and unintended pregnancies in general, see the Fragile Families volume of Future of Children.