Reflections on "Family Structure and Child Well-Being: Economic Resources vs. Parental Socialization"

The findings showed that cohabiting parents were closer to single parent families than married parent families in terms of economic disadvantage and differences in economic resources accounted for much more of the disadvantage associated with non-traditional family structures than differences in parenting.

Abstract

In Thomson, Hanson and McLanahan (1994), we investigated the relative importance of two types of parental resources – time and money – for explaining the association between family structure and children's academic and socioemotional development. Family structure was classified as married-parent, stepparent, cohabiting parent, divorced-mother and never-married mother families. The primary innovations of the study were as follows: (1. to use nationally representative data – the U.S. National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) – to examine the association between family structure and child well-being, and (2. to include a more diverse set of family structures than had been examined in the past, including cohabiting stepparent families and families headed by never-married mothers. The NSFH had over-sampled single-parent families, cohabiting couples, and stepfamilies, providing for the first time sufficient numbers of observations for these less common but theoretically meaningful family types. Briefly, our findings showed that cohabiting parents were closer to single parent families than married parent families in terms of economic disadvantage. We also found that differences in economic resources accounted for much more of the disadvantage associated with non-traditional family structures than differences in parenting, especially differences between single parent families and married parent families. Parenting differences, as measured in our data, accounted for only a small part of the differences associated with family structure.