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 tointersectional 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.