Union Formation in Fragile Families Carlson, Marcia; McLanahan, Sara; England, Paula
Demography,
05/2004, Letnik:
41, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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In this article, we use data from a new longitudinal survey-the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study-to examine union formation among unmarried parents who have just had a child together. We ...used multinomial logistic regression to estimate the effects of economic, cultural/inter-personal, and other factors on whether (relative to having no romantic relationship) parents are romantically involved and living apart, cohabiting, or married to each other about one year after the child's birth. Net of other factors (including baseline relationship status), women's education and men's earnings encourage marriage. Cultural and interpersonal factors also have strong effects: women's trust of men, both parents' positive attitudes toward marriage, and both parents' assessment of the supportiveness in their relationship encourage marriage. Supportiveness also encourages cohabitation, while fathers having a problem with alcohol or drugs and reporting higher conflict in the relationship discourage cohabitation. Fathers' physical violence deters couples' remaining in romantic nonresident relationships.
A growing literature documents the importance of family instability for child wellbeing. In this article, we use longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the ...impacts of family instability on children's cognitive and socioemotional development in early and middle childhood. We extend existing research in several ways: (1) by distinguishing between the number and types of family structure changes; (2) by accounting for time-varying as well as time-constant confounding; and (3) by assessing racial/ethnic and gender differences in family instability effects. Our results indicate that family instability has a causal effect on children's development, but the effect depends on the type of change, the outcome assessed, and the population examined. Generally speaking, transitions out of a two-parent family are more negative for children's development than transitions into a two-parent family. The effect of family instability is more pronounced for children's socioemotional development than for their cognitive achievement. For socioemotional development, transitions out of a two-parent family are more negative for white children, whereas transitions into a two-parent family are more negative for Hispanic children. These findings suggest that future research should pay more attention to the type of family structure transition and to population heterogeneity.
This article examines the prevalence, predictors and outcomes of unmarried mothers' repartnering patterns following a nonmarital birth. Results indicate that, within five years after a birth, ...approximately two-thirds of unmarried mothers end their relationship with the focal child's biological father, and more than half of these mothers enter new partnerships. Among those who repartnered, 60 percent of mothers formed unions with men who had higher economic capabilities than their former partners, 20 percent formed unions with men of similar capabilities, and 20 percent formed unions with men who had lower capabilities. This pattern holds for both nonresidential and coresidential unions. Our findings are consistent with marriage market, learning and evolutionary biology theories about union formation, and they provide support for qualitative evidence that unmarried mothers have high standards for new partners. While many mothers find new partners who seem to offer a higher level of economic security, many other mothers remain unpartnered, likely due (at least in part) to the limited pool of potential partners with relatively high levels of economic promise.
This study examines why low-income, unmarried parents who say that they plan to marry at the time their child is born do not follow through on their plans. We use data from a nationally ...representative birth cohort survey--the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 3,710)--combined with data from an embedded qualitative study--Time, Love, Cash, Caring, and Children (n = 47)--to explore the reasons behind this apparent discrepancy. We find that some of the difference between parents' expectations and behavior may be because of the overstatement of intentions at the time of the birth. Most of the discrepancy, however, results from parents' perceived social and economic barriers to marriage. Specifically, unmarried parents have a long list of financial and relationship prerequisites they believe must be met in order for them to wed. Combined with other factors, these standards lead to an indeterminate delay in marriage.
Accumulating literature has linked poverty to brain structure and function, particularly in affective neural regions; however, few studies have examined associations with structural connections or ...the importance of developmental timing of exposure. Moreover, prior neuroimaging studies have not used a proximal measure of poverty (i.e., material hardship, which assesses food, housing, and medical insecurity) to capture the lived experience of growing up in harsh economic conditions. The present investigation addressed these gaps collectively by examining the associations between material hardship (ages 1, 3, 5, 9, and 15 years) and white matter connectivity of frontolimbic structures (age 15 years) in a low-income sample. We applied probabilistic tractography to diffusion imaging data collected from 194 adolescents. Results showed that material hardship related to amygdala–prefrontal, but not hippocampus–prefrontal or hippocampus–amygdala, white matter connectivity. Specifically, hardship during middle childhood (ages 5 and 9 years) was associated with greater connectivity between the amygdala and dorsomedial pFC, whereas hardship during adolescence (age 15 years) was related to reduced amygdala–orbitofrontal (OFC) and greater amygdala–subgenual ACC connectivity. Growth curve analyses showed that greater increases of hardship across time were associated with both greater (amygdala–subgenual ACC) and reduced (amygdala–OFC) white matter connectivity. Furthermore, these effects remained above and beyond other types of adversity, and greater hardship and decreased amygdala–OFC connectivity were related to increased anxiety and depressive symptoms. Results demonstrate that the associations between material hardship and white matter connections differ across key prefrontal regions and developmental periods, providing support for potential windows of plasticity for structural circuits that support emotion processing.
This study assesses the relationship between academic achievement and body mass index for age (BMI) trajectories across childhood and adolescence, and investigates how this relationship is moderated ...by social context. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that academic achievement is not associated with improved BMI among youth from disadvantaged social contexts. We test for differences by race/ethnicity, and examine the role of county-level economic mobility in shaping these patterns. We use data from the longitudinal Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), an ongoing birth cohort study representative of children born in large US cities in 2000, and measure BMI, academic achievement, and social context at Years 5, 9, and 15. Estimating multilevel random effects linear regression models of BMI from childhood to adolescence, we find that youth who were exposed to social advantage displayed a negative association between academic achievement and BMI. In contrast, youth exposed to social disadvantage displayed no association between academic achievement and BMI. This difference was observed regardless of race/ethnicity. County-level economic mobility modified the observed relationship, such that youth living in places with low levels of mobility displayed higher BMI associated with high academic performance. The results suggest that the health costs of academic achievement among disadvantaged youth are concentrated in areas with low institutional support for upward mobility. The findings demonstrate that the unequal benefits of educational attainment begin early in life, while living in places that promote upward mobility can help individuals realize the health benefits of their own educational attainment.
•Educational success generally promotes health, but this benefit depends on childhood exposure to disadvantage.•Youth from disadvantaged social contexts did not demonstrate any BMI benefit associated with better academic achievement.•Living in places that promote upward mobility can help individuals realize the health benefits of educational attainment.
Abstract
Background
Childhood adversity is, unfortunately, highly prevalent and strongly associated with later psychopathology. Recent theories posit that two dimensions of early adversity, threat ...and deprivation, have distinct effects on brain development. The current study evaluated whether violence exposure (threat) and social deprivation (deprivation) were associated with adolescent amygdala and ventral striatum activation, respectively, in a prospective, well-sampled, longitudinal cohort using a pre-registered, open science approach.
Methods
One hundred and sixty-seven adolescents from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study completed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning. Prospective longitudinal data from ages 3, 5 and 9 years were used to create indices of childhood violence exposure and social deprivation. We evaluated whether these dimensions were associated with adolescent brain function in response to threatening and rewarding faces.
Results
Childhood violence exposure was associated with decreased amygdala habituation (i.e. more sustained activation) and activation to angry faces in adolescence, whereas childhood social deprivation was associated with decreased ventral striatum activation to happy faces in adolescence. These associations held when adjusting for the other dimension of adversity (e.g., adjusting for social deprivation when examining associations with violence exposure), the interaction of the two dimensions of adversity, gender, internalizing psychopathology, and current life stress.
Conclusions
Consistent with recent theories, different forms of early adversity were associated with region-specific differences in brain activation.
•Different dimensions of childhood adversity are important for HPA-axis function.•Childhood violence exposure predicted a blunted cortisol response in adolescence.•Childhood social deprivation was ...not associated with adolescents’ cortisol response.•The effect of violence exposure on peak activation was moderated by social deprivation.
The present study tested how two different dimensions of childhood adversity, violence exposure and social deprivation, were associated with the cortisol response to the Socially Evaluated Cold-Pressor task in a sample of 222 adolescents (n = 117 girls, n = 167 African American). Participants were part of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a probability sample of births in large US cities (>200,000) between 1998 and 2000. Our subsample includes births in three cities: Detroit, Toledo, and Chicago. The study design called for an oversampling of births to unmarried parents (3:1) which led to a large number of minority and economically disadvantaged adolescents. When children were ages 3, 5, and 9, mothers reported on exposures to violence and social deprivation that occurred in the past year. Exposures from the three waves were averaged to reflect violence exposure and social deprivation during childhood. Greater levels of violence exposure from ages 3 to 9 were associated with a blunted cortisol response to stress at age 15, even after controlling for social deprivation and other factors known to influence cortisol reactivity. Social deprivation from ages 3 to 9 was not associated with the cortisol response to stress; though in an exploratory analysis, social deprivation moderated the association between violence exposure and cortisol peak activation. In line with the Dimensional Model of Adversity and Psychopathology, these findings suggest that experiences of violence, but not social deprivation, during childhood may contribute to cortisol blunting that has been previously reported in samples with high levels of social deprivation. Findings from the present longitudinal study on a relatively large sample of under-represented minority youth provide insight into the ways two different dimensions of childhood adversity impact the cortisol response to stress.
We used data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine how couple relationship quality and parental engagement are linked over children's early years—when they are infants, ...toddlers, and preschoolers. Our sample included 1,630 couples who were coresident over Years 1-3 and 1,376 couples who were coresident over Years 3-5 (1,196 over both periods). Overall, we found that better relationship quality predicted greater parental engagement for both mothers and fathers—especially in the infant to toddler years; in contrast, we found little evidence that parental engagement predicted future relationship quality. In general, married and cohabiting couples were similar in how relationship quality and parenting were linked.
Objective To test the association between sleep duration and telomere length in a pediatric population. Study design We analyzed cross-sectional data for 1567 children from the age 9 study wave of ...the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a population-based birth cohort of children born between 1998 and 2000 in large American cities (population >200 000). We measured telomere length using quantitative polymerase chain reaction, and children's typical nightly sleep duration was reported by their primary caregivers. Using linear regression, we estimated the association between sleep duration and telomere length both in unadjusted models and adjusting for a number of covariates. Results We found that children with shorter sleep durations have shorter telomeres than children with longer sleep durations. Each hour less of nightly sleep duration is associated with having telomeres that are 0.015 log-kilobases per chromosome shorter ( P < .05). We found no difference in this association by race, sex, or socioeconomic status. Conclusions We provide preliminary evidence that children with shorter sleep durations have shorter telomeres. This finding is consistent with a broader literature indicating that suboptimal sleep duration is a risk for increased physiological stress and impaired health. Future research should address the limitations of our study design by using longitudinal study designs and telomere measurements, measuring sleep duration via polysomnography or actigraphy, and assessing the intermediate biological mechanisms of the link between sleep and telomere dynamics.
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