Title: Home moves in the early years: the impact on children in UK and US
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: Common sense holds that moving home is disruptive. British policies on housing offer families with children some protection from instability. Poor families with young children are more reliant on private rental, and are more likely to move in the US than in the UK. We ask whether moving home is of itself 'bad' for children, and if it is, whether the proposed transition towards a freer housing market in UK will have unintended effects on children. Research indicates the importance of stressful family events, neighbourhood conditions and residential mobility among influences on the well-being of young children, particularly in poor families. But it seldom examines these dimensions simultaneously. This project will do so, within a framework which compares the US and the UK. This project is one of the first to exploit the opportunity to compare two large samples of families who had a baby around 2000: the Fragile Families Study in US and the Millennium Cohort Study in UK. We will follow these families and where they lived up to age 5. There is a host of information about parental capabilities and circumstances which may help account for why they moved (or not) and how well their children progress. We will be able to gauge child progress in a comparable way on behavioural adjustment, verbal ability and their general health. We will first ask how many families, in each country, move home in a child's first five years, when, how often, how far, and why. We will describe moves as resulting in better or worse housing, parental employment or neighbourhood than the situation movers left behind, and compare movers with stayers. This leads to modelling the precursors of moving and disentangling the various factors at play; including neighbourhood, housing, and family characteristics. We then turn to the behavioural, health, and cognitive outcomes for children of various sorts of moves; distinguishing those that are infrequent and result in better housing or employment for the parents, from those which are triggered by adverse events such a family break-up, loss of employment or involve a move into a less favoured neighbourhood. We will also allow for the impact on children to vary by their age at move and family income and composition. The models will estimate a simple relationship between moves and child outcome, and then adjust for family and neighbourhood factors, yielding estimates of any direct and indirect effects on child outcomes. The models will be as comparable as possible between two countries to see if the different residential stability regimes are reflected in different child outcomes. Care will be taken to derive indicators as closely comparable as possible on such key variables as neighbourhood quality and family poverty status. The resulting derived variables will be made available for use by other researchers. The analysis will adopt statistical techniques to allow for sample weighting, potential bias due to survey dropout, missing data, and the selectivity of mobility. The MCS also has data on siblings which will be used as a robustness check in sibling fixed effects models. The project is designed to establish how much and in what circumstances moving home can be said to harm or enhance child development, and the extent to which the greater rate of early years home moving in the US, compared to UK, may be reflected in greater difficulties for children. These findings for the first five years of the 2000s will be of particular interest as the contrast in housing stability between the two countries is likely to diminish under reforms to social housing tenancies and housing benefit currently proposed for England. The project is confined to the first six years of the children's lives as the early years have been particularly neglected in the literature. The results will, however, form a basis for future study of residential and school mobility once the children pass into school ages.


Research activity codes: 2.3 PSYCHOLOGICAL, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC FACTORS;1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH;GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE