How do children fare in families that transition in and out of adversity?

Most studies of children’s wellbeing have not dealt effectively with the complexity of multiple disadvantage. Traditional approaches have employed a limited set of predictors and when multiple risk factors have been used they have often been dealt with by treating them as confounders. This present project is, instead, concerned with the experience of multiple disadvantage. Using newly developed multidimensional measures of family adversity, which considers both material and psychosocial adversity, for the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, we examine the persistence of multiple family adversity overtime and analyse its impact on children’s development outcomes. We focus on families that consistently experience multiple forms of adversity such as jobless families, sole-parent families, and families that live in disadvantaged neighbourhoods and examine their evolution longitudinally such as transitioning from sole-parent to two-parent families, from joblessness to being a ‘working family’, and from living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood to an advantaged neighbourhood. We first determine whether such transitions are accompanied by improvements across other measures of adversity or whether these families remain disadvantaged in other respects. We then examine what effects these transitions have on children’s wellbeing.