Dramatic changes in family demography in the United States have led to increasing numbers of children living in “non-traditional” households. A large body of literature documents the association between living in a non-traditional family structure/familial instability and children’s...

One of the concerns behind parental educational sorting is its potential to widen disparities in the ability of families to invest in their children’s development. Using data from the Fragile Families and Children Wellbeing Study, this paper investigates the association between parental...

For those interested in child wellbeing, time use can provide an unusually objective measure of exactly what youth are doing. Before we can evaluate how well children are doing and why some are doing better than others, it is important to understand what they are doing, with whom, and in which...

Today, 37% of all births are to unmarried mothers (Hamilton, Martin, & Ventura, 2006). This represents a doubling in nonmarital childbearing in the past 25 years. Reducing nonmarital childbearing and promoting marriage among unmarried parents have become major policy concerns because, although...

Most analyses of time and resource allocation in couple households ignore what couples do with their money, assuming that money is “absolutely fungible, qualitatively neutral, infinitely divisible, [and] entirely homogeneous” (Zelizer 1994). If, instead, couples’ money management sets the...

This study uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) to examine the effects of a father?s presence on the cognitive performance of his pre-school aged child. Cognitive performance is measured by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), a well-known indicator of...

Neighborhoods are important sites for the formation and development of social ties. In theory, living in a disadvantaged neighborhood may be associated with lacking social support. We investigate this hypothesis among mothers of young children using longitudinal data from the Fragile Families...

This study explores how mental illness shapes transitions to marriage among unwed mothers using augmented data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study. We estimate proportional hazard models to assess the effects of mental illness on the likelihood of marriage over a five year period...

Using a representative sample of children born to unwed parents drawn from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, this study investigates whether marriage after childbirth has a causal effect on early child cognitive ability, using a treatment outcome approach to account for the...