Past work on the relationship between cohabitation and childbearing shows that cohabitation increases fertility compared to being single, and does so more for intended than unintended births. Most work in this area, however, does not address concerns that fertility and union formation are joint processes, and that failing to account for the joint nature of these decisions can bias estimates of cohabitation on childbearing. For example, cohabitors may be more likely to plan births because they see cohabitation as an acceptable context for childbearing; alternatively, they may be more likely to marry than their single counterparts. In this paper, I use a modeling approach that accounts for the stable, unobserved characteristics of women common to nonmarital fertility and union formation as a way of estimating the effect of cohabitation on nonmarital fertility net of cohabitors’ potentially greater likelihood of marriage. I distinguish between intended and unintended fertility to better understand variation in the perceived acceptability of cohabitation as a setting for childbearing. I find that accounting for unmeasured heterogeneity reduces the estimated effect of cohabitation on intended childbearing outside of marriage by up to 50%, depending on race/ethnicity. These results speak to cohabitation’s evolving place in the family system, suggesting that cohabitation may be a step on the way to marriage for some, but an end in itself for others.

Using new data from three waves of the National Survey of Families and Households (N=1,963), we examine associations between adolescent family experiences and young adult well-being across a range of indicators, including schooling, substance use, and family-related transitions. We investigate how children living in biological two-parent families characterized by frequent marital conflict fare compared to those living in stepfather and singlemother families, and we assess whether differences can be understood in terms of family income and parenting practices. Findings suggest that exposure to parental conflict in adolescence is associated with poorer academic achievement, increased substance use, and early family formation and dissolution, often in ways indistinguishable from living in a stepfather or singlemother family. Income and parenting largely do not account for these associations. While children tend to do better living with two biological married parents, the advantages of twoparent families are not shared equally by all.

Prior research on marriage has tended to focus on cross-sectional differences between the married and unmarried, with little attention to selectivity, change over time, or the substantive implications of statistically different means. This paper addresses these issues and provides a perspective for thinking about the relative benefits of marriage. It examines how transitions into marriage and cohabitation are associated with change over time in multiple measures of well-being and social relationships. Change score methods are used to control for differences in unmeasured variables that may affect the link between union status and various individual and couple-level outcomes. The analysis shifts emphasis to trajectories as opposed to snapshots, and it draws attention to the variability in outcomes within and across union statuses. Results show no difference between the effects of moving into marriage compared to cohabitation on happiness, depression, contact with parents, or time spent with friends; they show some difference in health, self esteem, intergenerational relationships, and couple relationships. Nonetheless, when mean differences are statistically significant, they tend to be small and appear to dissipate over time. The authors conclude that similarities between marriage and cohabitation are more striking than differences.

A substantial body of research demonstrates links between poverty and family structure from one generation to the next, but leaves open key questions about the implications of these associations for aggregate-level change. To what extent does intergenerational inheritance affect trends in poverty and single parenthood over time? This paper examines how patterns of intergenerational inheritance play out in the population over the long run, using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys and a model of population renewal that takes into account intergenerational mobility and differential fertility across groups defined by poverty status and family structure. We find that recent patterns of intergenerational inheritance are contributing to growth in poverty and single parenthood, but their contribution is modest, falling well short of recent historical change and having little effect on the relative economic positions of single-parent and two-parent families.

In a recent paper, Manning, Smock, and Majumdar (2004) examine the stability of marital and cohabiting unions from the perspective of children and find that children born to cohabiting parents are more likely to experience a parental separation than children born to married parents. They find, further, that subsequent marriage among cohabiting parents is associated with increases in the stability of these families, particularly among whites. We rely on the same data, the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, to extend their findings. We focus on family stability from the perspective of the couple, estimating the risks of union dissolution following a first birth. Our empirical results complement Manning et al.'s by modeling four distinct trajectories of cohabitation and marriage around the time of the first birth and comparing the dissolution risks associated with each. We focus particular attention on comparing the stability of cohabiting couples who marry before a first birth and those who marry after a first birth. For these couples, we find that the ordering of cohabitation, marriage, and childbirth is not associated with union stability, and we interpret this to suggest that many cohabiting couples jointly plan marriage and childbirth.

This study investigates trends in the interdependence of poverty and family structure from one generation to the next, focusing specifically on mothers and daughters. This aspect of the mobility process has not been explored, despite widespread concern about the life chances of children in poor single-parent families and dramatic changes in the distributions of poverty and family structure in recent decades. We examine origin-by-destination status along the two dimensions of poverty and family structure, using rich panel data and loglinear models to parse out the associations between poverty and family structure within and across generations. Our results show that the intergenerational associations between poverty and family structure are strong, but operate through largely independent pathways. Net of the correlation between poverty and family structure within a generation, the intergenerational transmission of poverty is significantly stronger than the intergenerational transmission of family structure, and neither childhood poverty nor family structure affects the other in adulthood. Finally, despite important changes in the distributions of poverty and family structure, we find no evidence of change in the processes of intergenerational inheritance over time.

Using new data from the third wave of the National Survey of Families and Households, we examine the influence of detailed and time-varying measures of family life on children’s academic achievement, substance use, and early family formation and dissolution. First, focusing on adolescent family experiences, we compare young adult outcomes of children exposed to parental conflict in biological two-parent families, relative to those living in step and single-parent families. Next, following younger children who were in the parental home over the course of two waves of data collection, we model stability and change in family structure and parental conflict between early childhood and adolescence. We find that exposure to parental conflict in adolescence is related to young adult outcomes, often in ways that are indistinguishable from living in a step or single-parent family. Further, we find that sustained high conflict and marital disruption are related in similar ways to young adult outcomes, irrespective of levels of pre-disruption conflict. Conflict does not appear to explain the association between marital disruption and child outcomes, nor does it appear to moderate the association. While children tend to fare better living with two biological married parents, it is clear that advantages are not equally shared by all.

This paper uses new data from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A. FANS) to examine how neighborhood norms shape teenagers’ substance use. Specifically, it takes advantage of clustered data at the neighborhood level to relate adult neighbors’ attitudes and behavior with respect to smoking, drinking, and drugs, which we treat as norms, to teenagers’ own smoking, drinking, and drug use. We use hierarchical linear models to account for parents’ attitudes and behavior and other characteristics of individuals and families. We also investigate how the association between neighborhood norms and teen behavior depends on: (1) the strength of norms, as measured by consensus in neighbors’ attitudes and conformity in their behavior; (2) the willingness and ability of neighbors to enforce norms, for instance, by monitoring teens’ activities; and (3) the degree to which teens are exposed to their neighbors. We find little association between neighborhood norms and teen substance use, regardless of how we condition the relationship. We discuss possible theoretical and methodological explanations for this finding.

Using a hazards framework and panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979-2004), we analyze the fertility patterns of a recent cohort of U.S. white and African American women. We examine how completed fertility varies by women’s education, differentiating between intended and unintended births. We find that the education gradient on fertility comes largely from unintended childbearing, and it is not explained by childbearing desires or opportunity cost, the two common explanations in past literature. Less educated women want no more children than the more educated, so this factor explains none of their higher completed fertility. Less educated women have lower wages, but wages have little of the negative effect on fertility predicted by economic theories of opportunity cost. We propose three other potential mechanisms linking low education and unintended childbearing, focusing on access to contraception and abortion, relational and economic uncertainty, and consistency in the behaviors necessary to avoid unintended pregnancies. Our work highlights the need to incorporate these mechanisms into future research.