In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned that nonmarital childbearing and marital dissolution were undermining the progress of African Americans. The author argues that what Moynihan identified as a ...racespecific problem in the 1960s has now become a classbased phenomena as well. Using data from a new birth cohort study, the author shows that unmarried parents come from much more disadvantaged populations than married parents. The author further argues that nonmarital childbearing reproduces class and racial disparities through its association with partnership instability and multipartnered fertility. These processes increase maternal stress and mental health problems, reduce the quality of mothers' parenting, reduce paternal investments, and ultimately lead to poor outcomes in children. Finally, by spreading fathers' contributions across multiple households, partnership instability and multipartnered fertility undermine the importance of individual fathers' contributions of time and money, which is likely to affect the future marriage expectations of both sons and daughters.
This article uses new data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study to examine the reasons why white, Mexican American, and other Hispanic parents are approximately 2.5 times more likely ...than African American parents to marry within the 30 months after a nonmarital birth. Combining Fragile Families microdata with 2000 U.S. Census data shows that marriage market conditions exert a large influence on marriage decisions, even among couples that already have formed a romantic relationship and had a child together. The findings also show that an undersupply of employed African American men can explain a large portion of the racial and ethnic differences in marriage after a nonmarital birth. The current findings support the theory that marriage markets are influential not only during the search for romantic partners but also in determining whether romantic relationships, once formed, will lead to marriage.
Childhood adversity is heterogeneous with potentially distinct dimensions of violence exposure and social deprivation. These dimensions may differentially shape emotion-based neural circuitry, such ...as amygdala–PFC white matter connectivity. Amygdala–orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) white matter connectivity has been linked to regulation of the amygdala’s response to emotional stimuli. Using a preregistered analysis plan, we prospectively examined the effects of childhood exposure to two dimensions of adversity, violence exposure and social deprivation, on the adolescent amygdala–PFC white matter connectivity. We also reproduced the negative correlation between amygdala–PFC white matter connectivity and amygdala activation to threat faces. 183 15−17-year-olds were recruited from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study — a longitudinal, birth cohort, sample of predominantly low-income youth. Probabilistic tractography revealed that childhood violence exposure and social deprivation interacted to predict the probability of adolescent right hemisphere amygdala–OFC white matter connectivity. High violence exposure with high social deprivation related to less amygdala–OFC white matter connectivity. Violence exposure was not associated with white matter connectivity when social deprivation was at mean or low levels (i.e., relatively socially supportive contexts). Therefore, social deprivation may exacerbate the effects of childhood violence exposure on the development of white matter connections involved in emotion processing and regulation. Conversely, social support may buffer against them.
Trends in family formation during the past several decades have increased children's exposure to mothers' partnership instability, defined as an entrance into or exit from a coresidential union or a ...dating partnership. Instability, in turn, is associated with negative outcomes for children and adolescents. This study uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine associations between mothers' partnership instability and children's school readiness, differences between coresidential and dating transitions, and the moderating role of child gender. Mothers' partnership transitions are negatively associated with children's verbal ability and positively associated with boys' behavioral problems at age five. In general, coresidential and dating transitions have similar effects on school readiness. The findings have important implications for our understanding of the growing gender gap in educational attainment.
Partnership Transitions and Maternal Parenting Beck, Audrey N.; Cooper, Carey E.; McLanahan, Sara ...
Journal of marriage and family,
April 2010, Letnik:
72, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 1,975) to examine the association between mothers' partnership changes and parenting behavior during the first 5 years of their ...children's lives. We compare coresidential with dating transitions and recent with more distal transitions. We also examine interactions between transitions and race/ethnicity, maternal education, and family structure at birth. Findings indicate that both coresidential and dating transitions were associated with higher levels of maternal stress and harsh parenting; recent transitions had stronger associations than distal transitions. Maternal education significantly moderated these associations, with less-educated mothers responding more negatively to instability in terms of maternal stress and more-educated mothers responding more negatively in terms of literacy activities.
In this article, we use data from the first two waves of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the effects of child gender on father involvement and to determine if gender effects ...differ by parents' marital status. We examine several indicators of father involvement, including whether the father acknowledges "ownership" of the child, whether the parents live together when the child is one year old, and whether the father provides financial support when the child is one year old. We find some evidence that child gender is associated with unmarried father involvement around the time of the child's birth: sons born to unmarried parents are more likely than daughters to receive the father's surname, especially if the mother has no other children. However, one year after birth, we find very little evidence that child gender is related to parents'living arrangements or the amount of time or money fathers invest in their children. In contrast, and consistent with previous research, fathers who are married when their child is born are more likely to live with a son than with a daughter one year after birth. This pattern supports an interpretation of child gender effects based on parental beliefs about the importance of fathers for the long-term development of sons.
Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing survey linked to respondents' medical records (N = 2,870), this study examines the association between grandparents' education and birth ...outcomes and explores potential pathways underlying this relationship. Results show that having a grandfather with less than a high school education was associated with a 93 gram reduction in birth weight, a 59% increase in the odds of low birth weight, and a 136% increase in the odds of a neonatal health condition when compared with having a grandfather with a high school education or more. These associations were partially accounted for by mother's educational attainment and marital status as well as by prenatal history of depression, hypertension, and prenatal health behaviors, depending on the specific outcome. The findings from this study call for heightened attention to the multigenerational influences of educational attainment for infant health.
The Fragile Families Challenge is a scientific mass collaboration designed to measure and understand the predictability of life trajectories. Participants in the Challenge created predictive models ...of six life outcomes using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a high-quality birth cohort study. This Special Collection includes 12 articles describing participants’ approaches to predicting these six outcomes as well as 3 articles describing methodological and procedural insights from running the Challenge. This introduction will help readers interpret the individual articles and help researchers interested in running future projects similar to the Fragile Families Challenge.
Father Absence and Youth Incarceration Harper, Cynthia C.; McLanahan, Sara S.
Journal of research on adolescence,
September 2004, Letnik:
14, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This study measured the likelihood of youth incarceration among adolescent males from father‐absent households, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N=34,031 person‐years). At ...baseline, the adolescents ranged from 14 to 17 years, and the incarceration outcome measure spanned ages 15 to 30 years. This study tested whether risk factors concentrated in father‐absent households explained the apparent effects of father absence. Results from longitudinal event‐history analysis showed that although a sizable portion of the risk that appeared to be due to father absence could actually be attributed to other factors, such as teen motherhood, low parent education, racial inequalities, and poverty, adolescents in father‐absent households still faced elevated incarceration risks. The adolescents who faced the highest incarceration risks, however, were those in stepparent families, including father–stepmother families. Coresidential grandparents may help attenuate this risk, although remarriage and residential instability increased it. Social policies to support children should broaden beyond an emphasis on marriage to address the risks faced by adolescents living in stepfamilies as well.
In response to increases in cohabitation in the United States, researchers have recently focused on differences between cohabiting and marital unions. One consistent finding is a higher rate of ...domestic violence among cohabiting couples as compared with married couples. A prominent explanation for thisfinding is that cohabitation is governed by a different set of institutionalized controls than marriage. This article explores an alternative explanation, namely, that differences in selection out of cohabitation and marriage, including selection of the least-violent cohabiting couples into marriage and the most-violent married couples into divorce, lead to higher observed rates of violence among cohabiting couples in cross-sectional samples. Our results suggest that researchers should be cautious when making comparisons between married and cohabiting couples in which the dependent variable of interest is related to selection into and out of relationship status.
PDF
