Romich Jennifer
University of Washington.
Child Youth Serv Rev. 2009 Mar;31(3):338-345. doi: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2008.08.002.
Prior ethnographic evidence suggests that parents combat neighborhood dangers through spending time with and money on children perceived to be at risk. This paper summarizes a secondary data investigation of whether interactions between neighborhood quality and child characteristics predict patterns of intra-household resource allocation. Using a sample of N=1879 12- and 13-year-olds from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I find that in neighborhoods with greater numbers of problems, parents spend more time and money with firstborn children and who are particularly short or impulsive relative to how parents treat such children in lower problem neighborhoods. Comparisons of cross-sectional and sibling fixed-effect models suggest the shortness and firstborn effects are not due to unobserved family characteristics. These results lend modest support to the assertion that parents systematically try to use within-family resources to protect certain children from threats posed by neighborhoods with high levels of crime or low levels of social cohesiveness.
先前的人种学证据表明，父母会通过花时间陪伴以及为被认为处于危险中的孩子花钱，来应对邻里间的危险。本文总结了一项二手数据调查，该调查旨在探究邻里环境质量与儿童特征之间的相互作用是否能预测家庭内部资源分配模式。利用来自全国青年纵向调查的1879名12岁和13岁儿童的样本，我发现，在问题较多的社区，相较于在问题较少的社区父母对待此类孩子的方式，父母会花更多时间陪伴头胎孩子以及那些特别矮小或冲动的孩子，并在他们身上花费更多金钱。横断面模型和兄弟姐妹固定效应模型的比较表明，矮小和头胎效应并非源于未被观察到的家庭特征。这些结果为以下观点提供了一定支持：父母会系统性地尝试利用家庭内部资源，保护某些孩子免受犯罪率高或社会凝聚力低的社区所带来的威胁。
