Sociology Department Colloquium: Florencia Torche

Please join us for a colloquium being given by Florencia Torche, Professor of Sociology at New York University.

"Diverging Trajectories: Prenatal exposures, stratification, and children’s outcomes"

Stress is highly prevalent and unequally distributed along socioeconomic and ethno-racial lines. While the effect of stress on adults and children is well documented, virtually nothing is known about the long-term consequences of stress exposure before birth. This project combines natural experiments with longitudinal data and in-depth interviews to examine the causal effect of in-utero exposure to stress over the early life course. The findings show that prenatal stress has a negative impact on children’s cognitive and educational outcomes, and that this effect is acutely stratified by social class: It is large among poor families but it disappears among middle-class families, resulting in “divergent trajectories.” The socioeconomic stratification of the stress effect is not driven by higher exposure or higher sensitivity to stress among poor families, nor is it driven by a stratified effect of stress on birth outcomes. Rather, in-depth interviews suggest that it emerges from parental responses: Middle-class families mobilize multiple resources that successfully compensate for children’s early disadvantage.