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Ecological Instability and Children’s Classroom Behavior in Kindergarten

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Demography

Abstract

We engage the concept of ecological instability to assess whether children’s exposure to frequent change in multiple contexts is associated with teacher reports of students’ overall behavior, externalizing behavior, and approach to learning during kindergarten. We operationalize multiple dimensions of children’s exposure to repeated change—including the frequency, concurrency, chronicity, timing, and types of changes children experience—in a nationally representative longitudinal cohort of U.S.-born children (Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, N ~ 4,750). We focus on early childhood, a period of substantial flux in children’s family and neighborhood contexts. Predicted behavior scores differ by approximately one-fifth of a standard deviation for children who experienced high or chronic exposure to ecological change compared with those who experienced little or no change. These findings emphasize the distinctiveness of multidomain ecological instability as a risk factor for healthy development that should be conceptualized differently from the broader concept of normative levels of change in early childhood environments.

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Notes

  1. Approximately 300 children were omitted because their biological mother did not complete the kindergarten parent interview. Approximately 1,700 children completed the kindergarten wave but did not have a kindergarten teacher complete the survey. The teacher weights, used in this study, adjust for teacher nonresponse.

  2. Separate imputations were implemented for each operationalization of ecological change. Each imputation model included 10 iterations using the SVY suite of commands to account for complex survey design. Each imputation model was informed by all variables included in the associated full analytic model as well as by child development and physical health indicators from each wave and by kindergarten household factors.

  3. Results were sensitive to the cutpoints used for testing the threshold approach to assess overall frequency and domain frequency of change. In particular, raising the cutpoint for high levels of change strongly increased the magnitude of the association with behavior outcomes. However, other nonlinear specifications, such as a curvilinear model including a squared term for total number of changes during childhood, were not significantly different from the linear model.

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Acknowledgments

This research is based on work supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES1061058). Research funds were also provided by the NIH/NICHD-funded CU Population Center. We thank V. Joseph Hotz and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on previous versions of this manuscript. All errors and omissions are the responsibility of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Survey Research Center and Population Studies Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 426 Thompson St. 1248, Ann Arbor, MI, 48106-1248, USA

    Paula Fomby

  2. Department of Sociology and Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado Boulder, 483 UCB, 1440 15th Street, Boulder, CO, 80309-0483, USA

    Stefanie Mollborn

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  1. Paula Fomby
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Correspondence to Paula Fomby.

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 4 Weighted means and standard errors for control variables used to predict children's behavior at school entry as a function of prior ecological change
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Table 5 Full OLS regression models predicting teacher-reported overall behavior using count of ecological changes and count of domains of change, with control variables
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Fomby, P., Mollborn, S. Ecological Instability and Children’s Classroom Behavior in Kindergarten. Demography 54, 1627–1651 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-017-0602-2

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