Unequal Family Contexts for Children and Adolescents in Spain

The environment in which children and adolescents develop plays a crucial role in shaping
their future outcomes across various social, educational, economic, psychological, and health
domains. Current research on the connection between inequality and family context often
relies on predefined statistical categories like household income, parents' educational
attainment, ethnicity, or occupation. However, inequalities are not experienced as isolated
categories but at the intersection of multiple social identities, including gender, place of
origin, employment status, and living conditions. We propose a quantitative approach to
intersectional theory to understand how interconnected forms of inequality impact the family
and labour contexts of children and adolescents. We reconstruct the contexts in which
children (n=13,718) from different social classes are raised by utilising retrospective
information from the 2018 Spanish Fertility Survey, which details parents' family and labour
trajectories (n=9,685). This approach allows us to identify which social groups are more
likely to experience positively rewarded or socially penalised trajectories. Our findings
suggest that socially disadvantaged groups face higher exposure to unstable family
trajectories and that it is the interaction between various deprivation social categories that
contributes to more turbulent childhood and adolescence experiences instead of isolated
categories.