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Using seven waves of the child component of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (1986-98), I employ generalized linear mixed models to examine the effect of household income on child physical and mental health over the entire childhood period. The results of this dissertation support the hypothesis that household income influences the physical and mental health of children, both concurrently and over time. In generalized linear mixed models, the stable component of household income, that is, the average household income for a given child over the period in which he or she is observed, exerts a strong influence on risk for child chronic health limitation, child anxiety/depression and antisocial behaviour, and to a lesser extent, child medically attended accident or injury. However, the dynamic component of household income, defined as deviations in household income over time from the observed average of that household, is mostly unrelated to child health.

These findings have broader implications for life course theory and for the discipline of sociology as health inequalities researchers track the impact of socially significant events over time and reveal the long term processes underlying the social distribution of health.