Speaker
Garrett Baker
Graduate Student, Joint program in Public Policy and Sociology
Duke University
Abstract
Sociological research on parental investment and intergenerational transmission largely emphasizes between-family differences in such processes, especially as they pertain to the parenting of young children. This article instead focuses on within-family dynamics and asks whether, in multi-child households, an older child’s life-course troubles (arrest, delinquency, and substance use) prompt parents to recalibrate their parenting of their younger children. Using longitudinal fixed effects models with the NLSY79-CYA, I find that parents are particularly responsive to their older child’s criminal justice contact, which leads them to become less punitive and less willing to approach teachers for remedial support. Criminal justice contact does not, however, induce parents to withdraw from at-school involvement more generally. Such patterns reveal that youth’s system contact—as opposed to the transgressions which often lead to carceral punishment—is focally responsible for shaping parental behavior, though in perhaps more nuanced ways than prior work on system avoidance would suggest. At-school involvement and at-home cultural capital investment appear largely entrenched on average, though there is suggestive evidence that an older child’s marijuana use intensifies involvement and investment among marginalized mothers. This article, therefore, joins a burgeoning literature highlighting parents’ selectiveness in their resource deployment, household management, and institutional engagement.