Marcia J. Carlson

Union Formation in Fragile Families

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/interpersonal, 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.

Coparenting and Nonresident Fathers' Involvement with Young Children After a Nonmarital Birth

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.

Strengthening Unmarried Families: Could EnhancingCouple Relationships AlsoImprove Parenting?

Policy makers propose to promote healthy marriage among low‐income unmarried couples by providing services to improve relationship skills. This article uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to explore whether enhancing parents’ relationship skills may have spillover effects on parent‐child relationships. Drawing on findings that relationship quality is positively associated with parenting among married couples, the study examines whether a similar link holds for unmarried couples. A positive association is observed between parents’ relationship quality at the time of a baby’s birth and parenting about 1 year later for both mothers and fathers. Findings indicate that the association between relationship quality and parenting is not affected by marital status. Further, among unmarried couples, neither coresidence nor birth order affects the association.

Interstate migration of the US poverty population: Immigration “pushes” and welfare magnet “pulls”

This study evaluates the social and demographic structure of poverty migration during the 1985–90 period based on an analysis of recent census data. Particular attention is given to the roles of two policy-relevant factors that are proposed to be linked to poverty migration. The first of these is the role of immigration from abroad and its effect on the net out-migration of longer-term residents with below-poverty incomes, from States receiving the highest volume of immigrants. Such a response, it is argued, could result from job competition or other economic and social costs associated with immigration. The second involves the poverty population “magnet” effect associated with State welfare benefits (AFDC and Food Stamp payments) which has come under renewed scrutiny in light of the impending reform of the federal welfare program. The impact of both of these factors on interstate poverty migration is evaluated in a broader context that takes cognizance of other sociodemographic subgroups, and State-level attributes that are known to be relevant in explaining internal migration. This research employs an exceptionally rich data base of aggregate migration flows, specially tabulated from the full migration sample of the 1990 US census (based on the “residence 5 years ago” question). It also employs an analysis technique, the nested logit model, which identifies separately the “push” and “pull” effects of immigration, welfare benefits, and other State attributes on the migration process. Our findings are fairly clear. The high volume of immigration to selected US Statesdoes affect a selective out-migration of the poverty population, which is stronger for whites, Blacks and other non-Asian minorities as well as the least-educated. These results are consistent with arguments that internal migrants are responding to labor market competition from similarly educated immigrants. Moreover, we found that the impact of immigration occurs primarily as a “push” rather than a reduced “pull.” In contrast, State welfare benefits exert only minimal effects on the interstate migration of the poverty population—either as “pulls” or “pushes,” although some demographic segments of that population are more prone to respond than others. In addition to these findings, our results reveal the strong impact that a States racial and ethnic composition exerts in both retaining and attracting migrants of like race and ethnic groups. This suggests the potential for a greater cross-state division in the US poverty population, by race and ethnic status.Data Used: 1990 US census tabulations of full migration (“residence 5 years ago”) sample. Note: Detailed 1990 census statistics on migration of the poverty and nonpoverty populations for individual states can be found in: William H. Frey “Immigration and Internal Migration for US States: 1990 Census Findings by Poverty Status and Race,” Population Studies CenterResearch Report No. 94-320.

Low-Income Fathers’ Influence on Children

This article examines what we know about how low-income fathers matter for children. The authors first provide a theoretical background about how parents generally (and fathers more specifically) are expected to influence children’s development and well-being. The authors note the importance of considering differences across children’s age, gender, and race/ethnicity; and they identify key methodological challenges in this area. Then, they summarize the literature on residential fathers and child well-being, finding that greater involvement has been linked to better outcomes for children; however, much of this research has been conducted on more socioeconomically advantaged samples. For fathers who live away from their children, child support payments appear to improve children’s outcomes, but the benefits of father-child interaction are much less clear and likely depend on the quality of the interaction and the characteristics of fathers. Overall, the authors conclude that low-income fathers can have a positive influence on children’s well-being, but the evidence about the population overall is rather weak.

Post-Welfare Employment and Psychological Well-Being

SUMMARY Current public assistance policies are removing many recipients from the welfare rolls, regardless of their income level. This article examines the post-assistance well-being of a stratified probability sample of 426 “able-bodied” women and men who lost cash benefits when Michigan terminated its General Assistance program in 1991. The relationship of demographic, human capital, and psychological resource variables to employment status, depressive symptomatology and life satisfaction is examined utilizing two panels of survey data, collected approximately one and two years after the program ended. Findings demonstrate that personal mastery is related to employment status and risk of depression, and sense of burden is linked to both psychological outcomes, controlling for relevant demographic and human capital variables. Gender is related to risk of depression; however, its relation to employment is dependent on the presence of children in the household. Steady employment is positively associated with psychological well-being. Overall, the findings suggest that the majority of former recipients faced employment difficulties and psychological hardship, and that services should be targeted to subgroups of former recipients with particular risk factors.

What Kids Get from Parents: Packages of Parental Involvement across Complex Family Forms

While demographers continue to document the notable changes in family structure that have occurred in recent decades, little is known about the quality of parental investment that children receive across a range of contemporary family types. Employing data from a recent US urban birth cohort, we examine parental investment for children ages 1, 3, and 5 in two key domains: parent-child engagement (across three potential parent figures) and access to economic resources. Overall, we find that children living with their married biological parents are advantaged in both parental engagement and household income, while children living in other family types are less advantaged in one or both domains. Our research illuminates how changing family demography is related to parental investments in children, which has implications for public policies designed to support low-income families.

Coparenting in fragile families: Understanding how parents work together after a nonmarital birth.

Introduction Nonmarital childbearing has increased dramatically in the U.S. since the early 1960s, rising from 6% of all births in 1960 to fully 41% in 2008 (Hamilton, Martin, & Ventura, 2010). Whereas similar trends have occurred in many developed nations, the U.S. stands out in the extent to which such births are associated with socioeconomic disadvantage and relationship instability. This has given rise to a new term ‘fragile families,’ which we define as unmarried couples who have a child together. The increase in fragile families reflects changes not only in the initial context of births but also in the fundamental nature and patterns of childrearing. While much of the recent literature on coparenting has focused on married, coresident parents with children, most unmarried couples will break up within only a few years of a new child’s birth (McLanahan, 2009). Therefore, for many unmarried parents, coparenting will occur across households and may be more similar to coparenting among divorced parents than among married parents. However, given the disadvantaged characteristics of unmarried parents, coparenting in this context may be even more complicated than it is after a legal divorce. In this chapter, we provide an overview of coparenting in fragile families, focusing particularly on what has been learned from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. We

Childbearing Across Partnerships in Australia, the United States, Norway, and Sweden

This article compares mothers’ experience of having children with more than one partner in two liberal welfare regimes (the United States and Australia) and two social democratic regimes (Sweden and Norway). We use survey-based union and birth histories in Australia and the United States and data from national population registers in Norway and Sweden to estimate the likelihood of experiencing childbearing across partnerships at any point in the childbearing career. We find that births with new partners constitute a substantial proportion of all births in each country we study. Despite quite different arrangements for social welfare, the determinants of childbearing across partnerships are very similar. Women who had their first birth at a very young age or who are less well-educated are most likely to have children with different partners. The educational gradient in childbearing across partnerships is also consistently negative across countries, particularly in contrast to educational gradients in childbearing with the same partner. The risk of childbearing across partnerships increased dramatically in all countries from the 1980s to the 2000s, and educational differences also increased, again, in both liberal and social democratic welfare regimes.

Family Complexity Setting the Context

T volume is motivated by the dramatic changes in family life that have occurred in the United States over the past half century. Marriage has become less central to the life course, as individuals marry at older ages or not at all. Divorce rates rose rapidly until the 1980s and then plateaued and declined somewhat, although about half of marriages in the early twenty-first century were still predicted to end in divorce or permanent separation (Amato 2010); and the majority of those who divorce will remarry within 10 years (Bramlett and Mosher 2002). Cohabitation before (or instead of) marriage has become much more widespread; the percentage of women ages 15 to 44 whose first union was cohabitation (rather than marriage) increased from 47 percent in 1995 to 68 percent by 2006–2010 (Copen, Daniels, and Mosher 2013). Also, nonmarital childbearing has risen dramatically since the 1960s, such that today fully 41 percent of all births occur outside of marriage (Hamilton, Martin, and Ventura 2013).