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Like many sports in adolescence, junior hockey is organized by age groups. Typically, players born after December 31st are placed in the subsequent age cohort and as a result, will have an age advantage over those players born closer to the end of the year. While this relative age effect (RAE) has been well-established in junior hockey and other professional sports, the long-term impact of this phenomenon is not well understood. Using roster data on North American National Hockey League (NHL) players from the 2008-2009 season to the 2015-2016 season, we document a RAE reversal-players born in the last quarter of the year (October-December) score more and command higher salaries than those born in the first quarter of the year. This reversal is even more pronounced among the NHL \"elite.\" We find that among players in the 90th percentile of scoring, those born in the last quarter of the year score about 9 more points per season than those born in the first quarter. Likewise, elite players in the 90th percentile of salary who are born in the last quarter of the year earn 51% more pay than players born at the start of the year. Surprisingly, compared to players at the lower end of the performance distribution, the RAE reversal is about three to four times greater among elite players.

In intense academic environments such as in South Korea, students experience extreme levels of academic stress. This stress peaks as students prepare for the college entrance exam in the final year of high school. Stress is associated with a host of negative outcomes, and academic stress is the leading cause of suicidal ideation among youth in South Korea. Research suggests that in high-stress contexts such as this, social capital can improve academic success and mental health, while reducing risky or deviant behaviors. However, this research has predominantly focused on Western contexts. Because of the unique intensity of educational pursuits and intense investment in education by parents, South Korea provides a compelling case for research on the effects of family and school social capital on youth academic stress. Using data from the Korea Youth Panel Survey (N = 2753), we find that particular components of family and school social capital can both reduce and exacerbate academic stress. While measures of closeness and connection to parents reduced academic stress, school social capital had a limited impact on academic stress. Furthermore, there may be a limit to the effectiveness of social capital to help with academic stress before it becomes too much of a good thing.

Background/Objectives: Time spent with parents and educators encompasses a large portion of a child’s waking hours, with the home and early childhood education and care serving as two of the first settings in which children develop social and cognitive abilities. While previous studies have used social and cognitive tests to examine antecedents of child behavior, we extend such studies to take into account the congruence and incongruence of parents’ and teachers’ views on those antecedents. We examine the importance of parent-teacher alignment on the perceptions of a child’s personality and abilities in early development. Methods: Parents and teachers of 2968 German Kindergarten-aged (4–5 years old) children were surveyed using the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). Parents and teachers independently rated 10 child behavioral traits, with higher scores indicating more prosocial behavior. Educators also rated children on five developmental abilities (social abilities, ability to concentrate, language abilities, general knowledgeability, and mathematical reasoning) compared to the student’s peers. While previous work has often examined how parental investments in children or teachers’ views of children might be related to development, we provide a new take by examining parents and teachers in conjunction with each other. Research that has looked at both parents and teachers has tended to examine alignment, or lack thereof, on child behaviors and personality traits. We analyzed child developmental abilities using OLS regression models, measures of parent–teacher divergences in ratings of child behavior, and demographic controls. Results: Greater differences in parent and teacher perceptions of desire for knowledge were negatively associated with all five developmental abilities. Differences in parent and teacher perceptions on talkativeness, confidence, good-naturedness, and understanding were negatively associated with at least one developmental outcome. By contrast, differences in perceptions of children’s neatness were positively associated with all five developmental abilities. Conclusions: Using both parent and teacher perceptions of child behaviors and abilities is a unique approach to understanding the relevance of parent and educator perceptions to a child’s development. Our findings indicate the need for collaboration across young children’s home and school or care settings. Establishing congruence in perceptions and the kinds of relationships that can lead to such congruence can help children with behavioral issues receive support in both home and educational settings and encourage mutual respect and partnership between parents and educators.

Research on positional segregation in sport focuses on mechanisms perpetuating discrepancies in integrated contexts, including in majority-minority sports. However, theoretical explanations for positional segregation should apply to other status groups, such as ethnicity, that may be more salient in monoracial or nearly monoracial settings. We use 2018 to 2019 data on 790 NHL players and executives along with descriptive models previously applied to questions of racial segregation in sport to evaluate if stereotypes have led to ethnicity-based differences in athletes’ outcomes, using on-ice positions, leadership positions, team management positions, and penalty minutes related to stereotypes in playing style. Results show no evidence for ethnic stacking nor barriers to player leadership in the NHL but substantial differences in team management positions and penalty minutes. Our findings illuminate the degree to which theories concerning racial stereotyping mechanisms might be extended to apply in monoracial settings. Plain language summary Much research has shown that stereotypes linked to race are connected to the ways athletes are positioned on competitive fields or courts. This can in turn lead to limited opportunities for minority athletes in terms of endorsement or leadership opportunities. We are interested in whether the theories used to explain these patterns in reference to race can be used to examine the opportunities available to other minority groups. In this paper, we use data on 790 professional hockey players to see whether ethnic stereotypes lead to similar patterns in a mostly-white setting. We use descriptive methods traditionally used to examine spatial distributions of racial minorities in sport along with models that examine access to leadership positions to see how ethnic stereotypes might be used. We also use penalty minutes to try to identify patterns of ethnic stereotypes connected to playing style. We find little evidence that ethnic stereotypes affect player position or leadership opportunities in this mostly-white sport, but good evidence that ethnic stereotypes affect off-ice leadership opportunities and on-ice playing styles. While intriguing, these data cannot examine specific interactions involving stereotypes that players might experience. Our approach here could also be applied to other status groups, such as gender, sexual orientation, or age.

Background/Objectives: Child problem behaviors have been linked to immediate and long-term negative outcomes. Research has found that family and peer social capital have a strong influence on child behavioral outcomes. However, most research about social capital and child behavior problems has been conducted in Western contexts. Social capital may influence child behavior problems differently in non-Western sociocultural environments due to different family and peer dynamics. Methods: Using a sample from the Japan Household Panel Survey and Japan Child Panel Survey (N = 182), we expand this literature on various forms of social capital to the Japanese context with data that were collected between 2009 and 2014. We examine the relationship of family and peer social capital with children internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors using OLS linear regression. Results: Our results differ from what is commonly found in Western contexts. Whereas family and peer social capital are typically associated with both internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors in Western countries, we find that greater family social capital is associated with decreased externalizing problem behaviors but not internalizing problem behaviors in Japan, and peer social capital has no association on either type of problem behaviors. Conclusions: Our findings emphasize the importance of considering social and cultural contexts when exploring how social capital might encourage prosocial child outcomes.

Asian-American students have some of the highest scores for standardized tests in American schools—a pattern that is commonly attributed to immigrant selectivity. We extend this line of inquiry by examining mixed-race couples and their children. Using both the ECLS-K cohorts of 1998 and 2010, we document the persistence of the Asian-American educational advantage over time by comparing the math and reading scores of white students (1998 n = 6700; 2010 n = 4500) with Asian-American (1998 n = 500; 2010 n = 600) and biracial Asian/white (1998 n = 150; 2010 n = 150) students at the start of elementary school. Surprisingly, in bivariate models, biracial Asian/white students have some of the highest math and reading scores. Socioeconomic factors are an important part of this advantage. When we examine parenting practices, we find that parenting works in opposite directions for biracial and monoracial Asian couples—decreasing the size of the biracial Asian/white educational advantage but increasing the size of the Asian-American advantage compared with their white kindergartener peers at school entry.

Cohabitation has become an increasingly common context for childrearing, yet children living with cohabiting parents often exhibit poorer academic outcomes than peers with married parents. This study examines whether these disparities stem from cohabitation itself, subsequent family transitions, or underlying mechanisms related to resources, stress, or selectivity. Using data from the Growing Up in Australia: Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC), we follow 920 children born to cohabiting parents and track family structure changes alongside teacher-rated literacy and mathematics performance from ages 6 to 11 years. Generalized estimating equation models show that, although children whose parents transitioned to single-parent or other non-cohabiting arrangements initially appear to score lower academically, these differences are no longer significant once resource, stress, and selectivity variables are included. Instead, parental education, parental efficacy, homeownership, extracurricular participation, residential mobility, and parents’ region of origin more consistently predicts educational outcomes. Children with stably cohabiting parents and those whose parents later married do not differ significantly. Findings suggest that among children born to cohabiting parents in Australia, differences in later educational outcomes are largely explained by differences in parental education, efficacy, housing stability, and related factors, rather than by cohabitation or family instability alone.

Growing rates of childhood obesity globally create concern for individuals’ health outcomes and demands on health systems. While many policy approaches focus on macro-level interventions, we examine how the type of stability of a family structure might provide opportunities for policy interventions at the micro level. We examine the association between family structure trajectories and childhood overweight and obesity across three Anglophone countries using an expanded set of eight family structure categories that capture biological relationships and instability, along with potential explanatory variables that might vary across family trajectories and provide opportunities for intervention, including access to resources, family stressors, family structure selectivity factors, and obesogenic correlates. We use three datasets that are representative of children born around the year 2000 and aged 11 years old in Australia (n = 3329), the United Kingdom (n = 11,542), and the United States (n = 8837) and nested multivariate multinomial logistic regression models. Our analyses find stronger relationships between child overweight and obesity and family structure trajectories than between child obesity and obesogenic factors. Children in all three countries are sensitive to living with cohabiting parents, although in Australia, this is limited to children whose parents have been cohabiting since before their birth. In the UK and US, parents starting their cohabitation after the child’s birth are more likely to have children who experience obesity. Despite a few differences across cross-cultural contexts, most of the relationship between family structures and child overweight or obesity is connected to differences in families’ access to resources and by the types of parents who enter into these family structures. These findings suggest policy interventions at the family level that focus on potential parents’ education and career prospects and on income support rather than interventions like marriage incentives.

Although gender ideologies influence many outcomes, research shows they often fluctuate across the life course. Family structure transitions are one mechanism through which gender ideologies change. Divorced and single adults report more egalitarian ideologies than stably married adults. Little research has examined whether children in these families experience similar gender ideologies. Based on parental role modeling, we would expect children in non-traditional families to exhibit more egalitarian gender ideologies. We examine family structure and youth gender ideologies in two contexts, essentially two case studies: Germany and South Korea. Using Starting Cohort 3—Grade 5 (N = 4,021) and Starting Cohort 4—Grade 9 (N = 9,913) of the Germany National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) and Cohorts 1 (N = 2,844) and 2 (N = 3,449) of the Korea Youth Panel Survey (KYPS), we uncover counterintuitive findings that youth gender ideologies do not vary across family structures. Child gender is the most salient predictor of gender ideologies across contexts. Plain Language Summary Little research has examined whether children experience more egalitarian or less egalitarian gender based beliefs across various family structures, including step-families, single parent families, and two parent families. Based on parental role modeling, we would expect children in non-traditional families to exhibit more egalitarian gender beliefs. We examine family structure and youth gender ideologies in two contexts: Germany (NEPS) and South Korea (KYPS). Using Starting Cohort 3—Grade 5 (N = 4,021) and Starting Cohort 4—Grade 9 (N = 9,913) of the Germany National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) and Cohorts 1 (N = 2,844) and 2 (N = 3,449) of the Korea Youth Panel Survey (KYPS), we uncover counterintuitive findings that youth gender ideologies do not vary across family structures, but that it is the youth’s gender that is the most important predictor of a youth’s gender beliefs.

General education (GE) classes are designed to reflect the mission and goals of the university and to help students become more well-rounded, career-ready, and civically-minded post-graduation. Students’ perceptions of these courses have a significant influence on their capacity to succeed, and ultimately to get the most out of their college experience. Using results from an email questionnaire sent to students at a private university in the western United States, we analyze the relationships between perceptions of the GE experience, sense of community, and academic year, and we find that sense of community is positively associated with perceptions of GEs. These results also show freshmen having a higher sense of community than juniors or seniors, and that scholastic class in school is negatively associated with satisfaction with GEs. Furthermore, we find that seniors generally have a lower perception of the importance of GEs in their lives when compared to freshmen.