Announcements
: Orphan discipline and child neglect: An analysis from 48 countries
Child Abuse & Neglect | MPC Authors: Anna Bolgrien, Elizabeth Heger Boyle, Mehr Munir, Miriam L. King
Orphan exposure to violent discipline is poorly understood, as research on parents' disciplinary practices largely focuses on biological families. The little research that exists has found that orphans are at reduced risk of harsh discipline but fails to explain why. This analysis from over 48 countries finds the lower odds of physical discipline are a result, largely, of neglect.
Highlights
- Orphans are defined as children with one or no living parent.
- Orphans have lower odds of receiving physical, psychological, and nonviolent discipline.
- Lower odds of physical discipline are driven largely by caregiver neglect.
- Education on healthy disciplinary practices should be accompanied with caregiver support.
Learn more in this engaging story map of the research.
: Consequences of undocumented residents in the census—study shows trivial political impact
by PNAS Nexus
In recent years, some public figures have argued that undocumented residents in the United States should not be included in census data used for congressional apportionment because their inclusion unfairly benefits Democratic-leaning states.
MPC Member John Robert Warren and Robert E. Warren analyzed data from every census from 1980 through 2020 and used high quality state-level estimates of the size of the undocumented resident population at each time point. The authors then calculated how many House seats and how many Electoral College votes would have changed had undocumented residents been excluded from the data after each census. The study is published in the journal PNAS Nexus.
Previous efforts to address this question used projected rather than actual estimates and only considered the 2020 census. Using actual data from 1980–2020, the authors find that no more than five House seats or Electoral College votes would have switched states in any year if undocumented residents were removed and there were no years in which party control of the House or the outcome of a presidential election would have meaningfully changed.
In general, removing undocumented residents from census data used for apportionment would have had a trivial impact on party representation in the House or the outcome of presidential elections and is unlikely to have an increased impact in the future.
: Rising early adult mortality in the US
New research from the University of Minnesota shows that death rates for early adults, or adults aged 25-44, rose sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic and remain higher than expected post-pandemic.
Heightened death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic intensified an already negative trend for early adults, which began around 2010. As a result, early adult death rates in 2023 were about 70% higher than they might have been if death rates had not begun to rise about a decade before the pandemic.
Researchers from the University of Minnesota and Boston University analyzed death rates between 1999-2023. The study, published in JAMA Network Open, found:
- For early adults, there was a large jump in the death rate between 2019 and 2021, which are considered the core pandemic years. In 2023, the death rate remained nearly 20% higher than in 2019.
- Drug-related deaths are the single largest cause of 2023 excess mortality, compared with the mortality that would have been expected had earlier trends continued.
- Other important contributing causes were a variety of natural causes, including cardiometabolic and nutritional causes, and a variety of other external causes, including transport deaths.
"The rise in opiate deaths has been devastating for Americans in early and middle adulthood,” said Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, lead author and an associate professor in the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts and Associate Director at the Minnesota Population Center. “What we didn't expect is how many different causes of death have really grown for these early adults. It's drug and alcohol deaths, but it's also car collisions, it's circulatory and metabolic diseases — causes that are very different from each other. That tells us this isn't one simple problem to fix, but something broader."
"Our findings underscore the urgent need for comprehensive policies to address the structural factors driving worsening health among recent generations of young adults,” said author Andrew Stokes of Boston University. “Solutions may include expanding access to nutritious foods, strengthening social services and increasing regulation of industries that affect public health.”
Future research will explore ongoing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and the trends that were already in place when it began.
Funding was provided by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institute on Aging, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Minnesota Population Center. Original post of this article can be found on the UMN News website.
: Police interactions can increase epigenetic age in youth of color
New research from the University of Minnesota shows that stress caused by negative interactions with police can increase epigenetic age, which is a biological indicator that can differ from chronological age. Previous research has shown this stress can age adults more quickly, but few studies have studied increased epigenetic aging in children.
The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, found that negative police encounters were associated with greater epigenetic age acceleration, especially among Black youths who experienced more police intrusion than any other racial or ethnic group.
Key findings include:
- Epigenetic age acceleration for Black youth is partly attributable to negative police encounters, such as racial slurs and stop-and-frisks.
- Black youth experienced more types of police intrusion than white youths.
- Negative police encounters occurred as early as 8 years old and, on average, 13 years old.
- White youth experienced the lowest rates of accelerated epigenetic aging.
“Aging is a natural process in human life, but more rapid aging is associated with many negative health outcomes, including a higher mortality rate,” said Juan Del Toro, an assistant professor in the U of M College of Liberal Arts and lead author. “Emerging evidence suggests we can slow down epigenetic aging, and we hope to contribute to that research moving forward for better health outcomes long-term.”
Future research will explore strategies to slow epigenetic age acceleration among ethnically and racially minoritized communities, and will focus on addressing interpersonal and structural discrimination in policing.
Research is supported by the National Institutes of Health.
: New Research Sheds Light on the US Shift toward Smaller Families
The national fertility rate has been in steady decline in recent decades, but the fundamental transition from high to low fertility in the United States occurred between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1930s.
New research just out in Demography sheds new light on how fertility decline began in late nineteenth-century America, sparking the historic shift known as the Demographic Transition.
“We show that a growing number of Americans were choosing to stop childbearing after two or three children,” said George Alter of the University of Michigan Population Studies Center, who authored the study with J. David Hacker of the Minnesota Population Center. “It was not a gradual shift from larger to smaller families, and this suggests that a new preference for very small families was spreading. By 1910, this ideal was becoming common in the northern states, though it had still not taken hold in the South.”
Today, demographers can understand childbearing goals and behaviors with questionnaires such as the CDC’s National Surveys of Family Growth, fielded since the 1970s. But to understand what happened at the turn of the century, these historical demographers looked at the impact of multiple births (e.g., having twins) on subsequent family limitation.
The researchers supposed that multiple births strain family resources in ways that should highlight preferences for family size, birth spacing, and stopping behavior. Since couples with surviving twins reached their target family size sooner than couples with singleton births, they should be more likely to practice family limitation.
They examined these hypotheses by analyzing families with twins in the 1900 and 1910 U.S. Censuses– a project that Hacker noted would not have been possible without the large number of observations in the full-count IPUMS data set.
The investigators also used two new techniques. J. David Hacker developed a new way to impute children who died before the Census. And they used a regression technique called the “cure model” developed in biomedical research to distinguish between stopping and spacing of births.
They found clear evidence of family limitation following multiple births: Couples with twins or triplets were more likely to stop childbearing, and those who continued having children delayed their next birth.
“The results show that many American couples responded to multiple births by practicing some form of birth control,” said Alter.
The researchers found no evidence that some groups relied on birth spacing to reduce family size while others relied primarily on stopping.
Responses to multiple births were larger in groups previously known to be the drivers of fertility decline– high-SES couples living in urban areas of the United States. As expected, the researchers found little or no evidence of birth control among farm families in the South or among first-generation immigrant groups – but stopping and spacing behavior of second-generation immigrant groups suggests these couples were assimilating to new American childbearing norms.
“Roughly one third of all couples were aiming to stop after two or three children,” said Alter. “These couples were the vanguard of the small families that became dominant for the rest of the twentieth century.”
George Alter is Research Professor at ICPSR and the Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research and Professor of History at the University of Michigan. J. David Hacker is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota and a member of the Minnesota Population Center.