Conner From (beecharm82)

Children's time use patterns represent a potentially important mechanism for the transmission of disadvantage across generations. Recent international research indicates that more educated mothers tailor the content of time with children to favour activities that are particularly important at different developmental stages - a finding that has been termed the 'developmental gradient'. Using time diary data for a sample of Australian children, this paper seeks to extend previous work in several ways. We first establish whether a 'developmental gradient' exists in Australian children's time with mothers, comparable to the results from international studies. We go further, however, by extending the analysis to consider time investments provided by fathers and other adult caregivers, and examining the importance of resources for explaining the patterns of time use. Consistent with theory, our results indicate that educational gaps in time spent 'teaching' are largest in the 4-5 age group, gaps in 'play' time with fathers are largest for toddlers (2-3), and gaps in 'enrichment' are largest for 6-7 and 8-9. Time with parents appears to be the primary driver of observed patterns of time spent 'teaching' and 'playing', while for 'enrichment,' differences are distributed across caregivers, but largest for non-parent caregivers. These results are not driven by differential access to resources. Our results suggest that the developmental gradient represents a plausible mechanism for the transmission of intergenerational disadvantage in Australia, and that policy responses focussed on better educating parents to understand the developmental needs of their children are likely to be an effective response. Existing trust research has often failed to account for the possibility that communication impairments brought on by language barriers could explain low levels of trust both within and between countries. To test whether this is the case, I construct an 'index of communication potential' for a sample of 359 cross-country dyads composed of 21 European countries. Although similar indexes have been used previously, this is the first one to include instances of 'semi-communication' between related languages when calculating communication potential. Multiple regression analysis indicated not only that greater communication potential was associated with greater cross-country trust, but that this relationship was monotonic semi-communication was also associated with greater trust, but the link was weaker than for actually sharing a language. Recent research using an improved measure of poverty finds that poverty has fallen by nearly forty percent since the 1960s in the United States. But past research has not examined whether this finding holds across detailed demographic groups who might be more or less vulnerable to poverty. This paper helps fill that gap, focusing on one such vulnerable subgroup young adults. Using the Current Population Survey, this paper examines long-term trends in young adult poverty in comparison to other groups. In contrast to almost all other groups, young adults have seen no decrease in poverty since the 1960s. We explore potential reasons for this fact, finding that young adults lack access to benefits from government programs, and are increasingly unmarried, living alone, and disconnected from the labor market, factors that leave young adults more vulnerable than other groups to poverty. The findings have implications for how antipoverty policies might assist this vulnerable group. The association between television exposure and children's development is subject to controversial debates. Heavy television exposure may be detrimental to children by overstimulating their developing brains. It may also infringe on time that children would otherwise spend on more developmentally beneficial activities or parental interactions. In the present analysis, we use data from the 2004/5 birth cohort of the Growing Up in Scotland s