Non-cognitive skills in childhood and adolescence are associated with a host of outcomes in adulthood, including educational and occupational attainment. One explanation for these associations is that poor non-cognitive skills in early childhood interfere with the development of cognitive skills...

Past studies of the informal economy in the US focused on small geographic areas and select populations. This paper uses a nationally representative panel survey of urban parents, the largest and most diverse data yet, to describe the nature of informal work in the United States. Informal work...

This paper investigates to what extent stable and unstable three-generation family households (grandparent, parent and child) are associated with child socioemotional, cognitive and health outcomes over the first three years of a child’s life. Using longitudinal data from the Fragile Families...

Theories of family functioning suggest that childbearing with multiple partners may increase parenting stress due to changes in social and economic resources and the challenges associated with parenting across multiple households. These family processes may not be equally stressful for mothers...

While an extensive literature has shown that family structure is linked with child wellbeing, less well understood is how the dynamics within similar types of families affect children. Family systems theory posits that parents’ couple relationship is important for promoting children’s...

Research suggests that children from low-income families are more likely to exhibit behavioral problems than children from wealthier families and these adverse behaviors have long-term detrimental effects on academic outcomes, health and earnings. In this paper, we examine the relationship...

This paper uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study to examine whether family instability is associated with changes in perceived social support, material hardship, maternal depression, and parenting stress among mothers of young children. In addition to accounting for the...

Non-marital childbearing in the US has reached historic levels. Because of the instability of nonmarital partnerships, multipartnered fertility, whereby a woman has children with different men, has also increased. High father involvement and supportive coparenting may serve as barriers to...

Despite the growing scholarly attention to fathers’ roles in family life, the consequences of fathers’ involvement with children for men’s well-being have been little explored. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N=3,880), we evaluate how fathers’ involvement...

Data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 2,725) are used to examine associations between mothers‘ partnership instability and coparenting over the first five years after a nonmarital birth, differences between coresidential and nonresident, dating transitions and variation...