Abstract
Research on socioeconomic inequality and wellbeing focuses largely on mean-level analyses, leaving a distributional question underexamined: whether childhood financial circumstances (childSES) relate to not only where individuals land on average, but also who gains access to favorable outcomes and who remains at the lower end of the distribution. Using U.S. adult data from MIDUS 1 (N = 5570-5603), we applied generalized additive models for location, scale, and shape (GAMLSS) to examine associations between childSES and life satisfaction (LS) and personal growth (PG) across mean, dispersion, and ceiling probability. Higher childSES was associated with higher mean LS and ~4% lower dispersion, reflecting a floor-buffering rather than ceiling-lifting effect. For PG, higher childSES was associated with greater odds of reaching the maximum score (OR = 1.15). These patterns largely replicated in MIDUS 2 (N = 3,541-3,556) and persisted after accounting for adultSES. Findings are limited to a U.S. sample from 1995-1996.