Evidence suggests benefits of parental educational homogamy for infant and child well-being but ignores potential racial and ethnic variation in these benefits. Increasing disparities in infant health by maternal education and race, along with increasing educational sorting, raise questions about whether educational homogamy could contribute to these disparities. Drawing on a random sample of over 4 million live births in NVSS data from 2011 to 2020 and ordinary least squares regression, this study examines the relationship between infant health, parental educational similarity, and race and ethnicity. Our findings indicate a weak overall relationship between educational sorting and infant health at birth, with significant variation by race and ethnicity. In addition, absolute education levels and marital status more strongly predict infant health than educational assortative mating. Sensitivity analyses confirm the robustness of these findings across different modeling approaches and sample sizes. Our results indicate that parental educational sorting is only weakly related to infant health and cannot explain widening infant health gaps by race.

有证据表明，父母教育同质性对婴儿和儿童的福祉有益，但忽略了这些益处中潜在的种族和民族差异。母亲教育和种族造成的婴儿健康差异日益加大，以及教育分类的增加，引发了关于教育同婚是否会加剧这些差异的问题。本研究利用 2011 年至 2020 年 NVSS 数据中超过 400 万活产婴儿的随机样本和普通最小二乘回归，探讨了婴儿健康、父母教育相似性以及种族和民族之间的关系。我们的研究结果表明，教育分类与婴儿出生时健康之间的总体关系较弱，并且因种族和民族而存在显着差异。此外，绝对教育水平和婚姻状况比教育选型交配更能预测婴儿健康。敏感性分析证实了这些发现在不同建模方法和样本量中的稳健性。我们的研究结果表明，父母教育排序与婴儿健康的相关性很弱，并且不能解释不同种族之间婴儿健康差距扩大的原因。