The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was the first federal law to explicitly promote marriage and encourage the formation of two-parent families. Since then, proposed legislation has earmarked more than $1.5 billion to encourage states to design programs that encourage and support healthy marriage. A primary motivation for this is a belief that family instability negatively affects children. In this case, ideology is backed by social science research, which suggests that residing in alternative families (i.e., single parent, stepparent) does pose risks for children in ways that shape their futures. What remains less clear is why family instability in the parent generation affects well-being in the child generation, including children's own future marital trajectories. Is it the actual experience of family instability that is responsible for differences in children's life chances, characteristics of the mother that select children into these family structures, or a combination of both? The proposed project addresses these issues by: 1) examining the contribution of both family instability and related maternal characteristics to adjustment in middle childhood, 2) investigating the role in intra-family dynamics in explaining the effects of both family instability and related maternal characteristics, and 3) exploring how family instability, maternal selection characteristics, and youth adjustment come together to shape the transition to adulthood in ways that forecast unstable families in the child generation. To do this, we will use a set of regression techniques (path analysis, event history analysis) on cohorts drawn from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD), a prospective birth cohort study that collected detailed measures of family processes, state of the art measures of child adjustment, and household roster information more than 20 times from birth to 3rd grade, and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a nationally representative study of adolescence in 1995 that follows young people through the transition to adulthood and includes retrospective measures of family instability as well as union formation expectations and behaviors. By leveraging data sets that include rich measures and cover the early life course, findings from this project will provide a clearer picture of the factors that drive the intergenerational transmission of family instability, which will inform family policy. Family instability intimately shapes the opportunities and life chances of children and, at the population level, is associated with rising inequality among American children. Understanding how family instability is transmitted across generations can inform policy and intervention programs designed to ameliorate child well- being as family structure change becomes a ubiquitous feature of American childhood. ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
| Augustine, Jennifer March; Cavanagh, Shannon E; Crosnoe, Robert (2009) Maternal Education, Early Child Care and the Reproduction of Advantage. Soc Forces 88:1-29 |
