Re-thinking Stepfathers’ Contributions: Fathers, Stepfathers, and Child Wellbeing

Using data from a contemporary cohort of children, we revisit the question of whether children benefit from being close to and engaging in activities with a stepfather. We deploy the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a birth cohort study of nearly 5000 children born in US cities in 1998–2000, with a large oversample of nonmarital births. We explore the relationships between stepfathers’ closeness and active engagement and youth’s internalizing and externalizing behaviors and school connectedness at ages 9 and 15 for between 550 and 740 children (depending on the wave) with stepfathers. We find that the emotional tenor of the relationship and level of active engagement between youth and their stepfathers are associated with reduced internalizing behaviors and higher school connectedness. Our findings suggest that stepfathers’ roles seem to have evolved in ways that are more beneficial to their adolescent stepchildren than was previously the case.

The Economics of Disconnected Adults and Unstable Families

This chapter demonstrates the ways in which harsh economic forces have undermined the stability of American families. The fragile families that the 1965 Moynihan Report identified as a phenomenon limited to poor, urban African American families in the next two decades spread to the underclass of all races as economic inequality and insecurity expanded in the United States. Since then, as economic restructuring has increasingly decimated the job opportunities of the working class, their families too have become destabilized. The end result is that marriage rates have plummeted among poor and working-class families, while rates of divorce and nonmarital births have skyrocketed. American families are now the most unstable in the world, at considerable cost to the well-being of adults and, particularly, children. While some commentators, including J. D. Vance, have argued that the problems of the poor and working class derive from cultural rather than economic sources, clear analysis shows the roots of these problems are firmly planted in the economic domain.

The Enduring Influence of Cohort Characteristics on Race-Specific Homicide Rates

This study extends research on cohort effects and crime by considering how bifurcated population dynamics and institutional constraints explain variation in homicide rates across racial groups in the United States. Drawing upon the extensive research on racial residential segregation and institutional segmentation, we theorize how the criminogenic influences of cohort characteristics elucidated in prior work will be greater for Black cohorts than for White cohorts. We assess our hypothesis by estimating Age-Period-Cohort Characteristic models with data for the total population and separately for the Black and White populations over the 1975–2014 period. The results reveal persistent effects of relative cohort size and nonmarital births on Black cohort-specific homicide rates but null effects among the White population. These effects follow Black birth cohorts across the life course, leading to higher rates of both homicide arrest and homicide victimization.

From an Alternative to a Precarious Family Form? The Changing Role of Education in Nonmarital Childbearing in Germany

This paper examines the association of education and family forms based on data of the German microcensus 1996–2012. The investigation shows that highly educated women in western Germany had a higher probability of living in a nonmarital instead of a marital union. With an increase in the share of nonmarital births, the association has reversed. Likewise, the highly educated couples were initially the vanguards of living in nonmarital unions with children, but they are nowadays the least likely to do so. Patterns differ between eastern and western Germany, though.

Family Inequality: Diverging Patterns in Marriage, Cohabitation, and Childbearing

Popular discussions of changes in American families over the past 60 years have revolved around the “retreat from marriage.” Concern has focused on increasing levels of nonmarital childbearing, as well as falling marriage rates that stem from both increases in the age at first marriage and greater marital instability. Often lost in these discussions is the fact that the decline of marriage has coincided with a rise in cohabitation. Many “single” Americans now live with a domestic partner and a substantial fraction of “single” mothers are cohabiting, often with the child's father. The share of women who have ever cohabited has nearly doubled over the past 25 years, and the majority of nonmarital births now occur to cohabiting rather than to unpartnered mothers at all levels of education. The emergence of cohabitation as an alternative to marriage has been a key feature of the post–World War II transformation of the American family. These changes in the patterns and trajectories of family structure have a strong socioeconomic gradient. The important divide is between college graduates and others: individuals who have attended college but do not have a four-year degree have family patterns and trajectories that are very similar to those of high school graduates.

Changes in Family Composition

This article discusses the consequences of family composition for poverty and income and its implications for policy. Marriage rates are declining, rates of nonmarital births are increasing (both poverty-increasing), while families are smaller, and there are more working mothers (both poverty-decreasing). Marriage remains less likely and nonmarital births more common for blacks than for whites and Hispanics, though even among whites, 36 percent of births were to unmarried mothers by 2011. On the other hand, divergent patterns across education groups are more common: marriage rates have continued to fall, but not for women with college degrees. Men’s earnings have fallen, and, after an increase, women’s have also declined—though less so for those with bachelor’s degrees. The article also discusses policy responses designed to reduce nonmarital childbearing (potentially reducing the number of children and families at high risk of poverty) and to help single-mother families (reducing the risk of poverty faced by such families).