Effects of Child Health on Family Resources

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children born to unmarried parents are more likely than those born to married parents to experience spells of poverty as they grow up. They are also more likely to have health, behavior, and school problems. Having a seriously unhealthy child may be a further destabilizing force for these already "fragile" families because of the extra burden of caring for the child and the added demands on the family's resources. In this sense, unhealthy children born out-of-wedlock may be at even higher risk than their healthy peers. We will use augmented data from the national Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study of mostly unwed parents to estimate the effects of poor infant and child health on a broad array of family, financial, and community resources available to the child (parental relationships, household composition, subsequent fertility, parents' employment, child care arrangements, subsequent education, receipt of public assistance, child support, use of pediatric health care, and the child's participation in preschool programs for high-risk ). We will synthesize our results by comparing resources available to children with and without serious health problems. We also will compare health outcomes of children at age 5 by both their health status in infancy and the resources they received during their first 5 years. The results will yield important information about the processes underlying the health component of the intergenerational transmission of poverty.