Many working families continue to struggle in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the deepest and longest economic downturn since the Great Depression. In Children of the Great Recession, a group of leading scholars draw from a unique study of nearly 5,000 economically and ethnically diverse families in twenty cities to analyze the effects of the Great Recession on parents and young children. By exploring the discrepancies in outcomes between these families—particularly between those headed by parents with college degrees and those without—this timely book shows how the most disadvantaged families have continued to suffer as a result of the Great Recession.

Several contributors examine the recession’s impact on the economic well-being of families, including changes to income, poverty levels, and economic insecurity. Irwin Garfinkel and Natasha Pilkauskas find that in cities with high unemployment rates during the recession, incomes for families with a college-educated mother fell by only about 5 percent, whereas families without college degrees experienced income losses three to four times greater. Garfinkel and Pilkauskas also show that the number of non-college-educated families enrolled in federal safety net programs—including Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or food stamps)—grew rapidly in response to the Great Recession.

Other researchers examine how parents’ physical and emotional health, relationship stability, and parenting behavior changed over the course of the recession. Janet Currie and Valentina Duque find that while mothers and fathers across all education groups experienced more health problems as a result of the downturn, health disparities by education widened. Daniel Schneider, Sara McLanahan and Kristin Harknett find decreases in marriage and cohabitation rates among less-educated families, and Ronald Mincy and Elia de la Cruz-Toledo show that as unemployment rates increased, nonresident fathers’ child support payments decreased. William Schneider, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, and Jane Waldfogel show that fluctuations in unemployment rates negatively affected parenting quality and child well-being, particularly for families where the mother did not have a four-year college degree.

Although the recession affected most Americans, Children of the Great Recession reveals how vulnerable parents and children paid a higher price. The research in this volume suggests that policies that boost college access and reinforce the safety net could help protect disadvantaged families in times of economic crisis.

IRWIN GARFINKEL is the Mitchell I. Ginsberg Professor of Contemporary Urban Problems and co-founding director of the Columbia Population Research Center (CPRC) at Columbia University.

SARA MCLANAHAN is the William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University.

CHRISTOPHER WIMER is Research Scientist at the Columbia Population Research Center (CPRC) at Columbia University.

Winner of the 2016 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems

Winner of the 2016 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award Presented by the American Sociological Association's Section on Race, Gender, and Class 

Honorable Mention, 2017 Outstanding Book Award from the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section of the American Sociological Association

“Unequal City is a revelatory study that shows and tells how inner city young people struggle to acquire a decent education. It powerfully describes the everyday challenges these students face—illuminating how they navigate school and their local communities and the way they confront what too often holds them back. This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the relationship between inequality and urban education.”

—Elijah Anderson, William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Sociology, Yale University

“Carla Shedd has written an important book about how race and place shape the experiences of young people in Chicago. Unequal City stands out for many reasons, but most importantly for its empirical richness. Shedd has amassed amazing data and uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to amplify the voices of young people. If you want to understand what young people think about such topics as the police, schools, and in-equality, you should read this book. It is a timely and insightful book.”

–Cathy Cohen, David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago

Chicago has long struggled with racial residential segregation, high rates of poverty, and deepening class stratification, and it can be a challenging place for adolescents to grow up. Unequal City examines the ways in which Chicago’s most vulnerable residents navigate their neighborhoods, life opportunities, and encounters with the law. In this pioneering analysis of the intersection of race, place, and opportunity, sociologist and criminal justice expert Carla Shedd illuminates how schools either reinforce or ameliorate the social inequalities that shape the worlds of these adolescents.

Shedd draws from an array of data and in-depth interviews with Chicago youth to offer new insight into this understudied group. Focusing on four public high schools with differing student bodies, Shedd reveals how the predominantly low-income African American students at one school encounter obstacles their more affluent, white counterparts on the other side of the city do not face. Teens often travel long distances to attend school which, due to Chicago’s segregated and highly unequal neighborhoods, can involve crossing class, race, and gang lines. As Shedd explains, the disadvantaged teens who traverse these boundaries daily develop a keen “perception of injustice,” or the recognition that their economic and educational opportunities are restricted by their place in the social hierarchy.

Adolescents’ worldviews are also influenced by encounters with law enforcement while traveling to school and during school hours. Shedd tracks the rise of metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and pat-downs at certain Chicago schools. Along with police procedures like stop-and-frisk, these prison-like practices lead to distrust of authority and feelings of powerlessness among the adolescents who experience mistreatment either firsthand or vicariously. Shedd finds that the racial composition of the student body profoundly shapes students’ perceptions of injustice. The more diverse a school is, the more likely its students of color will recognize whether they are subject to discriminatory treatment. By contrast, African American and Hispanic youth whose schools and neighborhoods are both highly segregated and highly policed are less likely to understand their individual and group disadvantage due to their lack of exposure to youth of differing backgrounds.

CARLA SHEDD is assistant professor of sociology and African American studies at Columbia University.