Frauke Peter (DIW Berlin)
C. Katharina Spieß (DIW Berlin und FU Berlin)
Abstract
Family related factors that form a child's environment seem to be of particular importance, probably more important for the explanation of child outcomes than the environment of other care taking institutions, such as day care centers or schools. In light of this literature, this paper focuses on the impact of changes in family structure during children's early years and during adolescence on the development of socio-emotional behavior and non-cognitive skills. Our analysis concentrates on the early years as well as on young adolescence for two reasons: First, the early years are arguably most important for later outcomes. Second, by analyzing early childhood outcomes we focus only on short-term effects, but especially non-cognitive skills are skills that can be formed later on in life and thus, young adolescents might be influenced strongly. Our empirical analysis is based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). We use non-cognitive skills as our primary measure of child outcomes and compare them with more cognitive related outcomes. Family structure changes are defined by maternal partnership variations, as only biological mothers can be identified definitively in our data sets. A maternal partnership change can either be a different partner, a new partner, or no partner. Our analysis suggests that differences in family stability account for some of the gradient in social-behavioral difficulties for 5-6-year-olds. For young adolescents preliminary results suggest that multiple partner changes are negatively correlated with non-cognitive skills, e.g., they are less likely to be active or self- determined in life.