Unequal Family Contexts for Children and Adolescents in Spain

Carlos Ruiz-Ramos , Centre for Demographic Studies
Andres F. Castro Torres, Centre for Demographic Studies

The context in which children and adolescents grow is a critical factor that determines their future development and their social, educational, economic, psychological, and health outcomes. Current research relating inequality and family context to children's development tends to rely on predefined statistical categories (e.g., household income, parent's educational attainment, ethnicity or occupation). Nonetheless, inequalities are not experienced as isolated categories but at the intersection of multiple social identities like gender, place of origin, employment status, or dwelling conditions. We propose a quantitative approach to intersectional theory to assess how interconnected forms of inequality shape children and adolescents' family and labour context. The retrospective information from parents' family and labour trajectories provided by the 2018 Spanish Fertility Survey will allow us to reconstruct the context in which children from different social classes are raised, in order to understand which social groups are more exposed to positively rewarded and socially penalized trajectories. And, most importantly, which are the mechanisms by which these unequal trajectories affect children's development.

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 Presented in Session 40. Flash Session Family Effects on Children