Child & Family Well-Being

The well-being of poor families and children has become a matter of especial interest since the implementation of welfare reforms in the mid-1990s brought major policy and program changes to the social safety net. The relationship between family structure and well-being, the demographics of poverty, and policies to improve well-being have always been a central area of IRP research. Much of the work listed on the "Welfare Reform" page under "Research" addresses the extent to which child and family well-being have been affected by the reforms.

A conference on nonmarital fertility, held at IRP in April 1999, brought together researchers from different disciplines to provide perspectives on our knowledge on family formation and the well-being of children. The revised conference papers were published (Summer 2001) by the Russell Sage Foundation under the title, Out of Wedlock: Causes and Consequences of Nonmarital Fertility, ed. Lawrence Wu and Barbara Wolfe.

IRP has also given support to another important project concerning family formation, the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study. The study, also called "The Survey of New Parents," follows a birth cohort of (mostly) unwed parents and their children over a four-year period. The study is designed to provide new information on the capabilities and relationships of unwed parents, as well as the effects of policies on family formation and child well-being. A baseline national report for the study data became available in March 2003.

IRP Discussion Papers, Special Reports, and Reprints

Sibling Similarity and Difference in Socioeconomic Status
Conley, D., Glauber, R., and Olasky, S.

Given the important role that women now occupy in the labor market and the overall system of economic stratification, it is important to document sister associations on a full range of outcome measures. Likewise, wealth is now taken to be a key component of socioeconomic status, so documenting sibling correlations in net worth is important in describing the degree of economic mobility in U.S. society. Finally, differences in sibling correlations in SES imply potentially different processes by which advantaged and disadvantaged families interact with the social structure of opportunity in the wider society. The current paper extends inquiry into the effects of unmeasured family background by considering sisters in addition to brothers, by considering wealth in addition to income, by examining differences in sibling correlations across population subgroups, and by examining age-cohort differences in correlations across these population subgroups. (DP 1291-04)

Intimate Partner Violence and Child Maltreatment: Understanding Co-occurrence and Intergenerational Connections
Lynette M. Renner and Kristen Shook Slack

Low-income adult women were interviewed regarding their experiences with intimate partner violence and child maltreatment during childhood and adulthood, and intra- and intergenerational relationships between different forms of family violence were identified. Analyses demonstrated weak to moderate associations across multiple forms of violence within generations. Only weak support was found for the transmission of violence hypothesis, and stronger support for the theory of learned helplessness. (DP 1278-04)

Managing to Parent: Social Support, Social Capital, and Parenting Practices among Welfare-Participating Mothers with Young Children
Maryah S. Fram

This study investigated relationships among mothers' social support, individual attributes, social capital, and parenting practices for welfare-participating mothers with young children, using data from the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies. (DP 1263-03)

Predicting Early Fatherhood and Whether Young Fathers Live with Their Children: Prospective Findings and Policy Reconsiderations
S. Jaffee, A. Caspi, T. Moffitt, A. Taylor, and N. Dickson

This prospective study of a birth cohort explores the individual and family-of-origin characteristics associated with the age at which young men become fathers, the length of time they live with their children, and the psychosocial characteristics in young adulthood that are associated with the amount of time spent living with the children. (DP 1235-01)

Child Well-Being and the Intergenerational Effects of Undocumented Immigrant Status
S. M. Kanaiaupuni

Findings of this study support the author's argument that children with undocumented immigrant parents suffer higher risks of poverty and poor health than children in legal households, and that children in mixed-status households are equally disadvantaged. (DP 1210-00)

The Fragile Family and Child Well-Being Study: Questions, Design, and a Few Preliminary Results
S. McLanahan and I. Garfinkel

This paper discusses how the Fragile Family and Child Well-Being Study addresses questions such as the capabilities of new unwed families, the nature of relationships in fragile families, and how children fare in fragile families. (DP 1208-00)

Self-Sufficiency of Former Foster Youth in Wisconsin: Analysis of Unemployment Insurance Wage Data and Public Assistance Data
A. Dworsky and M. Courtney

The report uses administrative data to analyze employment, earnings, and public assistance receipt among former Wisconsin foster youth who exited out-of-home care between 1992 and 1998. (SR81)

Child Care Quality: Does It Need to Be Improved?
D. L Vandell and B. Wolfe

The authors ask whether there is an economic justification for public intervention to improve the quality of nonparental child care, especially for children from lower-income families. The bulk of their evidence suggests that the answer is yes. The report offers evidence from large- and small-scale studies of the effects of child care on children's development and sets out the economic rationale that emerges from the evidence. (SR 78)

Historical and Life Course Trajectories of Nonmarital Childbearing
L. Wu, L. Bumpass, and K. Musick

RPT 829 (Out of Wedlock: Causes and Consequences of Nonmarital Fertility, ed. L. Wu and B. Wolfe [New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001], pp. 3-48)

Finds that increases in nonmarital fertility over the past 25 years have been driven largely by dramatic increases in nonmarital first births. More than four of five first births to black women and one of three to white women occurred outside of marriage in the mid-1990s. The chapter examines the trajectories of women through marital and cohabiting unions and traces how these experiences relate to married and unmarried childbearing.

Intergenerational Effects of Nonmarital and Early Childbearing
R. Haveman, B. Wolfe, and K. Pence

RPT 827 (Out of Wedlock: Causes and Consequences of Nonmarital Fertility, ed. L. Wu and B. Wolfe [New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001], pp. 287–316)

Does a child born to an unmarried mother have lower attainments as a young adult owing to the lower life trajectory of the mother? Are these adverse effects of unmarried childbearing larger for the children of teen unmarried mothers than for those of older unmarried mothers? We use information on 1,899 children from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Our results suggest that very different family dynamics may lie behind the educational and teen fertility outcomes of children born to young unmarried mothers.

Neighborhood Deprivation Affects Children's Mental Health: Environmental Risks Identified in a Genetic Design
A. Caspi, A. Taylor, T. E. Moffitt, and R. Plomin

RPT 819 (Psychological Science, Vol. 11, no. 4 [July 2000], pp. 338–342).

A nationwide study of 2-year-old twins shows that children in deprived neighborhoods were at increased risk for emotional and behavioral problems over and above any genetic liability. The results suggest that the link between poor neighborhoods and children's mental health may be a true environmental effect, and demonstrate that genetic designs are environmentally informative and can be used to identify modifiable risk factors for promoting child health.

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