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Residential Mobility Across Early Childhood and Children’s Kindergarten Readiness

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Demography

Abstract

Understanding residential mobility in early childhood is important for contextualizing family, school, and neighborhood influences on child well-being. We examined the consequences of residential mobility for socioemotional and cognitive kindergarten readiness using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, a nationally representative longitudinal survey that followed U.S. children born in 2001 from infancy to kindergarten. We described individual, household, and neighborhood characteristics associated with residential mobility for children aged 0–5. Our residential mobility indicators examined frequency of moves, nonlinearities in move frequency, quality of moves, comparisons between moving houses and moving neighborhoods, and heterogeneity in the consequences of residential mobility. Nearly three-quarters of children moved by kindergarten start. Mobility did not predict cognitive scores. More moves, particularly at relatively high frequencies, predicted lower kindergarten behavior scores. Moves from socioeconomically advantaged to disadvantaged neighborhoods were especially problematic, whereas moves within a ZIP code were not. The implications of moves were similar across socioeconomic status. The behavior findings largely support an instability perspective that highlights potential disruptions from frequent or problematic moves. Our study contributes to literature emphasizing the importance of contextualizing residential mobility. The high prevalence and distinct implications of early childhood moves support the need for further research.

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Notes

  1. Supplemental analysis compared children who remained in the sample and those who were omitted because of attrition. Results showed no significant difference between the two groups in the number of early moves (from birth to Wave 1). Additional supplemental analyses omitted the approximately 350 children who had a valid kindergarten teacher weight but whose biological mother did not respond at one or more waves. Relationship direction and significance were identical, and coefficient size changed very little.

  2. Because of our more complicated operationalizations of residential mobility that assess linear and nonlinear relationships, move quality, and move distance across early childhood, other approaches isolating causal estimates such as propensity scores cannot be implemented: there was not a single dichotomous treatment or exposure, and we have few pretreatment characteristics (from before the child’s birth) to estimate the likelihood of mobility. Others (as mentioned earlier) have made great strides disentangling causality from selection in the implications of residential mobility, so we chose to focus on dynamic operationalizations of mobility instead, although we control for a host of characteristics that might shape mobility and behavior.

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Acknowledgments

This research is based on work supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES 1061058) and a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health (NICHD F32 HD 085599). Funds were also provided by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the University of Colorado Population Center (P2C HD066613) and the Carolina Population Center (P2C HD050924). We thank Richard Jessor and Laurie James-Hawkins for their contributions to this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Behavioral Science and Department of Sociology, University of Colorado Boulder, UCB 483, Boulder, CO, 80309-0483, USA

    Stefanie Mollborn

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV, USA

    Elizabeth Lawrence

  3. Department of Geography and Division of Epidemiology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Elisabeth Dowling Root

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  1. Stefanie Mollborn
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  2. Elizabeth Lawrence
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Correspondence to Stefanie Mollborn.

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Mollborn, S., Lawrence, E. & Root, E.D. Residential Mobility Across Early Childhood and Children’s Kindergarten Readiness. Demography 55, 485–510 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0652-0

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