Although an extensive literature has shown that family structure is linked with child well-being, less well understood is how the dynamics within families affect children, in particular the extent to ...which positive mother—father relationship quality is linked with children's outcomes. In this study the authors used data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 773) to examine how couple supportiveness in stable coresident families is related to children's externalizing and internalizing behavioral problems over ages 3 through 9. Using latent growth curve and fixed effects models, they found that parents' greater supportiveness has a slight association with lower levels of children's behavioral problems. Using cross-lagged structural equation models to examine the direction of the association, they also found some evidence that parents' relationship quality and children's behavioral problems are reciprocally related. Overall, this study suggests that more positive couple interactions are beneficial for children residing with both of their biological parents.
Objective
We consider the prevalence of family complexity and its association with children's externalizing behavior problems over children's life course and over historical time.
Background
A ...growing literature has demonstrated the prevalence and multidimensional nature of family complexity and its association with child behavior. The nature/strength of this association may have changed in recent cohorts as family complexity has become more normative.
Method
Data are from the 1997 and 2014 cohorts of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement. Samples represent U.S. children aged 0–12 years born since 1985 (N = 5,030). Ordinary least squares regression estimated change in the association between family complexity and behavior between cohorts. Difference‐in‐difference models estimated baseline and longitudinal differences in children's behavior as linked to family complexity.
Results
The prevalence of family complexity has stabilized over the last two decades, and the antecedents to parental repartnering and complex sibship organization remain similar. The expectation that increasing family complexity contributes to elevated behavior problem scores was not supported. Instead, children who eventually acquired a step‐ or half‐sibling or who experienced parents' union dissolution had elevated behavior problems prior to those changes.
Conclusion
The prevalence of and precursors to complex family organization were stable across recent child cohorts. The observed association between family complexity and child behavior problems may be attributable to selection mechanisms linked to both parents' family formation trajectories and to children's behavior, rather than to family change itself.
Research has shown that living away from one's biological father is associated with a greater risk of adverse child and adolescent outcomes; yet, the role of the father-child relationship in ...understanding this association has not been directly investigated. This study uses data on biological fathers' relationships with their children from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 2,733) to assess whether father involvement mediates the relationship between family structure (i.e., father absence) and four measures of adolescent behavior. Differences in father involvement are shown to account for a sizeable fraction of the variance in outcomes by family structure. Father involvement does not affect boys and girls differently but is more beneficial when the father lives with the adolescent.
Prior Journal of Marriage and Family decade‐in‐review articles have grappled with the definition and role of family policy for research and policy practice while emphasizing its value to both. In ...this article, we begin with a broad conceptualization of family policy that encompasses actions intended to achieve explicitly stated goals for families (explicit policies) and those that affect families without an explicitly stated goal for doing so (implicit policies), which we believe provides a solid framework for guiding and understanding both research and practice in the field. Second, we review major U.S. policy initiatives in the past decade and their documented and potential effects on families. Third, we describe several key aspects by which contemporary families have become more diverse and complex. Fourth, we discuss the implications of ongoing family complexity for public policies. We conclude with a discussion about future research and policy development in the context of contemporary family complexity.
We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to investigate the association between coparenting quality and nonresident fathers' involvement with children over the first five years ...after a nonmarital birth. We find that about one year after a nonmarital birth, 48% of fathers are living away from their child, rising to 56% and then to 63% at three and five years, respectively. Using structural equation models to estimate cross-lagged effects, we find that positive coparenting is a strong predictor of nonresident fathers' future involvement, whereas fathers' involvement is only a weak (but significant) predictor of future coparenting quality. The positive effect of coparenting quality on fathers' involvement is robust across several techniques designed to address unobserved heterogeneity and across different strategies for handling missing data. We conclude that parents' ability to work together in rearing their common child across households helps keep nonresident fathers connected to their children and that programs aimed at improving parents' ability to communicate may have benefits for children irrespective of whether the parents' romantic relationship remains intact.
BACKGROUND While a striking rise in shared physical custody after divorce has been observed in Wisconsin and some European countries, the same trend in shared custody has not been documented in US ...national data. OBJECTIVE We provide new evidence on the time trend in shared physical custody after divorce in the United States. METHODS We use eight waves of data from the Current Population Survey - Child Support Supplement to estimate logit models and conduct a formal decomposition. RESULTS The likelihood of shared physical custody after divorce more than doubled in the United States from before 1985 until 2010-2014, from 13% to 34%. Non-linear probability (logit) models show that non-Hispanic Whites and more advantaged individuals are more likely to report shared physical custody. Both sequential multivariate models and a more formal decomposition show that the increase cannot be explained by changes in the characteristics of those divorcing; rather we find that several characteristics become more strongly associated with shared physical custody over time. CONCLUSIONS Our results suggest that shared physical custody is increasing in the United States as a whole, and this increase appears to reflect changing norms and policies that favor shared custody. These changing patterns have important implications for children's living arrangements and for the parental investments that children receive after their parents' divorce - and more broadly for the rise in inequality across families over recent decades. CONTRIBUTION This paper complements previous analyses using court record data from a single US state (Wisconsin) and shows that a large increase in shared physical custody after divorce has occurred in the United States as a whole over the past three decades.
...overall economic inequality has notably increased (whether measured by earnings, income, or wealth), and many lower-income families today experience poverty and economic hardship. David Autor ...(2014) describes some of the key trends behind rising premiums to education and high skills; he finds that the earnings gap between college and high school–educated men roughly doubled in the three decades between 1979 and 2012, and that this trend is nearly as strong for women. ...those without a college degree are increasingly left out of experiencing the fruits of economic growth. Nonstandard Schedules Work schedules are also more variable, and work is more likely to occur during nonstandard hours (Presser 2003; Lozano, Hamplová, and Le Bourdais 2016; Craig and Powell 2012; Golden 2015); and unstable work schedules have been linked with a lower likelihood of having health insurance (Lim 2019) and greater adverse health outcomes (Schneider and Harknett 2019). Some research has even found that union density or coverage predicts positive spillovers to wages of nonunion private-sector employees (Denice and Rosenfeld 2018), suggesting that the decline in union membership affects the economic potential and economic security not only of union members themselves.
Fathers' roles in family life have changed dramatically over the past 50 years. In addition to ongoing breadwinning responsibilities, many fathers are now involved in direct caregiving and engagement ...with children. Yet there is considerable variation in what fathers do, especially depending on whether they live with or away from their child. In this article, the authors use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 3,869) to describe how fathers' economic capacities (money) and direct involvement with children (time) are associated over child ages 1 to 9 for resident versus nonresident fathers, net of confounding factors. They found suggestive evidence that money and time investments operate differently across residential contexts: Resident fathers experience a trade‐off between market work and time involved with children. In contrast, nonresident fathers' higher economic capacities are associated with more time involvement, underscoring the greater challenge for such fathers to remain actively involved.
Objectives
This article examines how the levels of nonresidential fathers' involvement (over child ages 1–9) differ by race/ethnicity (comparing white, black, and Hispanic fathers), and then ...considers how individual and couple characteristics may “account for” any observed differences.
Method
Data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 2,447) and random effects models were used to examine how nonresidential fathers' involvement (with respect to time, engagement, shared responsibility, and co‐parenting with mothers) is differentiated by race and ethnicity.
Results
Overall, black nonresident fathers were significantly more likely to spend time and engage in activities with their children as compared to Hispanic fathers—but not white fathers. Black fathers also shared responsibilities more frequently and displayed more effective co‐parenting than Hispanic and white fathers.
Conclusion
Fathers’ involvement with children is shown to differ across major race/ethnic groups, with implications for children as well as for future research and public policy.
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