With American children on course to grow into the most obese generation of adults in history, Sonia Caprio argues that it is critical to develop more effective strategies for preventing childhood obesity and treating serious obesity-related health complications. She notes that although pediatricians are concerned about the obesity problem, most…

Now that some of the historic barriers to economic success for U.S. women and minorities have begun to fall, women and blacks, in particular, are moving upward on the nation's socioeconomic ladder. Melissa Kearney reviews evidence that improved economic opportunities for these two groups make sex and race less important than they once were in…

Most Americans expect the nation's colleges and universities to promote the goal of social mobility to make it possible for anyone with ability and motivation to succeed. But according to Robert Haveman and Timothy Smeeding, income-related gaps both in access to and in success in higher education are large and growing. In the top-tier…

Although education pays off handsomely in the United States, children from low-income families attain less education than children from more advantaged families. In this article, Cecilia Elena Rouse and Lisa Barrow investigate why family background is so strongly linked to education. The authors show that family socioeconomic status affects such…

In his survey of research on social mobility and U.S. immigration, George Borjas underscores two insights. First, most immigrants are at a sizable earnings disadvantage, relative to nativeborn workers. Second, the earnings of different groups of immigrants vary widely. The children of immigrants "catch up" to native-born workers slowly.…

Children from low-income families are more likely than other children to have serious health problems. And, as Anne Case and Christina Paxson show, childhood health problems can prevent poor children from achieving economic success as adults. Income-related disparities in childhood health are evident at birth or even before, and the disparities…

Many U.S. policymakers support changing the "culture" of poor parents to encourage marriage, work, and religion as a means to end the intergenerational transmission of poverty. In this article Jens Ludwig and Susan Mayer review and evaluate research on how parental work, marriage, and religion affect children's socioeconomic status…

Steven Barnett and Clive Belfield examine the effects of preschool education on social mobility in the United States. They note that under current policy three- and four-year-old children from economically and educationally disadvantaged families have higher preschool attendance rates than other children. But current programs fail to enroll even…

Emily Beller and Michael Hout examine trends in U.S. social mobility, especially as it relates to the degree to which a person's income or occupation depends on his or her parents' background and to the independent contribution of economic growth. They also compare U.S. social mobility with that in other countries. They conclude that…

The authors introduce readers to the research documenting racial and ethnic gaps in school readiness. They describe the key tests, including the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS), and several intelligence tests, and describe how they have been administered to several important national samples of…

This article considers whether the disparate socioeconomic circumstances of families in which white, black, and Hispanic children grow up account for the racial and ethnic gaps in school readiness among American preschoolers. It first reviews why family socioeconomic resources might matter for children's school readiness. The authors concentrate…

The author considers whether differences in genetic endowment may account for racial and ethnic differences in school readiness. While acknowledging an important role for genes in explaining differences "within" races, he nevertheless argues that environment explains most of the gap "between" blacks and whites, leaving little role for genetics.…

The author documents pervasive racial disparities in the health of American children and analyzes how and how much those disparities contribute to racial gaps in school readiness. She explores a broad sample of health problems common to U.S. children, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, asthma, and lead poisoning, as well as maternal…

This article allows readers to look at racial and ethnic disparities in school readiness from a neuroscience perspective. Although researchers have traditionally measured gaps in school readiness using broad achievement tests, they can now assess readiness in terms of more specific brain-based cognitive functions. Three neurocognitive…

In the United States black women have for decades been twice as likely as white women to give birth to babies of low birth weight who are at elevated risk for developmental disabilities. Does the black-white disparity in low birth weight contribute to the racial disparity in readiness? The author summarizes the cognitive and behavioral problems…