Family structure and the gender gap in ADHD
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Family structure and the gender gap in ADHD Kelly Bedard1 Allison Witman2 ●
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Received: 17 November 2018 / Accepted: 6 December 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract We document the large, excess male-female gap in ADHD diagnosis and treatment rates for non-traditional families. Pre-teen boys in traditional families are 2.9 percentage points more likely to have been medicated for ADHD in the past two years than girls in traditional families, while the same gap for non-traditional families is 5.4 percentage points. We also document a similar pattern of boys in nontraditional families for ADHD-related outcomes such as attention span, learning disability, emotional difficulties and unhappiness. Examining alternative pathways to family structure, we rule out typical forms of disadvantage but find that school policies may interact with family structure to increase the male ADHD diagnosis and medication gap. We also highlight an important limitation of the family fixed effects models often used in family structure research, showing that the largest effects are for only children. Keywords Family structure Human capital Mental health ●
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JEL codes I14 J12 J18 ●
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1 Introduction By 2017, the percentage of U.S. children living in a traditional two- parent household had fallen to 69%, and the percentage living with a single mother had reached 23% (U.S. Census Bureau 2017). Even among two-parent families, there has been a shift towards cohabiting biological parents, divorced and remarried step-parents and same-sex couples. Given this changing landscape, it is not surprising that there is a
* Kelly Bedard [email protected] * Allison Witman [email protected] 1
University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
2
University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, NC, USA
K. Bedard, A. Witman
long-standing and active research effort studying the impact of family structure on child outcomes. Most studies find that children raised in non-traditional families tend to fare worse in outcomes including cognitive scores, aggressive behavior, anxiety/ depressive symptoms (Craigie et al. 2012), delinquent behaviors such as smoking, drinking, or having sex (Antecol and Bedard 2007; Evenhouse and Reilley 2004; Francesconi et al. 2010a), teenage childbearing (Painter and Levine 2000), test scores (Gennetian 2005; Ginther and Pollak 2004), GPA (Evenhouse and Reilley 2004), and educational attainment (Case et al. 2001; Ermish and Francesconi 2001; Ginther and Pollak 2004; Painter and Levine 2000; Riphahn and Schwientek 2015). However, not all research finds differences for children from non-traditional families (Bjorklund et al. 2007; Francesconi et al 2010b). Recent research also suggests that boys might be especially affected by exposure to non-traditional family structures. Bertrand and Pan (2013) and Lundberg (2017) find that boys’ externalizing behavior and the likelihood of school suspension are more sensitive to father absence than girls’, and Autor et al
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