Childrens Movement in and out of Parental Household in the - PDF document

Children’s Movement in and out of Parental Household in the United-States: An Overview Inbar Weiss, R. Kelly Raley, and Robert Reynolds University of Texas-Population Research Center The rise in divorce, cohabitation, non-marital fertility and other changes in the traditional family structure in the second half of the 20 th century (Cherlin 2004) led to an extensive exploration on the effect of changes in family structure and family instability on children’s well-being (e.g. Coleman, Ganong, and Fine 2000; Fomby and Cherlin 2007). Almost three decades of research conclude that children who experience family instability in childhood are at higher risk of behavior problems, low academic achievement and health issues. Recent studies suggest that these effects and their strength differ by the type of transitions and that some changes have a stronger effect than others (Magnuson and Berger 2009; Lee and McLanahan 2015). Two changes in family structure that have been mostly ignored and are likely to have a strong effect on children’s well-being are the movements of children in and out of their parents’ home. Most studies of family instability measure children’s family instability by using the marital and cohabitation histories of their mothers, assuming that children live with their mothers through their childhood and adolescence. This assumption and the structure of data that are typically in use do not allow us to measure the number and the effect of moving in and out of parental household. Using the 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), which is a longitudinal household roster dataset, we aim to overcome this problem and to estimate the movement of children in and out of their parental household. The goal of this paper is to test how often children leave their parents’ household, how long it takes them to reenter a parental household and how these transitions differ by sex, race, and household structure. Background Family instability and children well-being Parental divorce, remarriage and cohabitation are family disruptions that destabilize the family system and cause stress among children and their parents (Cooper et al. 2009; Fomby and Osborne 2017). Moving to new residence, adapting to new household members and to new household routine 1

and activities are changes that cause stress and are associated with both parental union instability and children well-being (Coleman, Ganong, and Fine 2000). Beside stress, children who face family disruption also experienced reduction in time parents spend monitoring them and a reduction in parent-child communication (Astone and McLanahan 1991). These poorer outcomes can be exacerbated when stepparents are involved, as remarriage disrupts the ability of parents to raise their children due to time and energy investment in the new partner over childrearing. Biological mothers who remarried, for example, were found to be less involved in their children education than parents in both parents households (Bogenschneider 1997). In addition, stepparents invest less in their interaction with stepchildren, show less affection and are less involved in their activities and problems (Coleman, Ganong, and Fine 2000). At the same time, stepchildren may not be willing to accept the resources that stepparents are providing (Downey 1995). The stress, reduction in parent-child time and the changes in norms and routines affect children’s well-being. Recent studies find that maternal union instability is negatively associated with children’s emotional development, behavior problems, academic achievement and health. Osborne and McLanahan (2007) for example, find that the number of partnership transitions has a positive effect on anxious, depressed and aggressive behaviors of children at age 3. A similar effect was also found to be significant at older ages (Cavanagh and Huston 2006; Fomby and Osborne 2017; Lee and McLanahan 2015). In addition, drug use among adolescent was found to be especially high among children in single father or father and step-mother households and the stress related to changes in family structure are one of the explanations to these findings (Hoffmann and Johnson 1998). Family instability also negatively affects children performance in school as measured by self- reported GPA (Heard 2007) and high-school graduation rates(Zill, Ruane Morrison, and Coiro 1993; Cavanagh, Schiller, and Riegle-Crumb 2006). In terms of health, children in unstable families are at higher risk of asthma and obesity than children in stable families with similar family structure at birth (Bzostek and Beck 2011) and young adults who experience parental divorce during childhood are more likely to experience mental health problem (Chase-Lansdale, Cherlin, and Kiernan 1995). The effect of family instability on health has even further implication as adults who experienced as children changes in family structure are found to be less likely to reach medical and mental help when in need (Evans et al. 2017). 2

Measuring family instability Most studies that focus on children’s family instability measure it using mothers’ partnership history. Researchers usually use data collected from women on their fertility, marital, and cohabitation histories and rearrange these data to create measurements of children’s family instability (e.g. Raley and Wildsmith 2004; Fomby and Cherlin 2007; Schoon et al. 2012). These analyses usually rely on one of two assumptions: that children live with their mother throughout childhood and therefore the mothers’ union instability reflects the instability that children experience. Or that the union instability of mothers and fathers is the same so children who live with their fathers experience the same family instability as children who live with their mothers. In this paper, using the case study of leaving and entering parental household we show that these two assumptions are problematic and lead to misestimating family instability among children. Assuming that children live with their mothers ignores types of transitions that are understudied- for example, the movement of children in and out of their parents’ households- and, focusing on mothers’ partnership instability does not allow us to test the transitions that children in fathers’ households experience. Moving in and out of parental households Our motivation in understanding transition between in and out of parental households related to the potential effect that these transitions have on children well-being, to the children who are at risk and to the potential bias in the current family instability estimates. First, the effect of leaving parental household might have a stronger effect on children’s well-being than an absent of one parent. Lee and McLanahan (2015) found that different types of transitions have affected children’s development differently, and that transitions out of two-parent families have a stronger negative effect than transitions into two-parent families. Based on this logic, moving to a nonfamily household might have an even stronger effect on children well-being. Second, it is possible that children who are already at a disadvantage are at higher risk of leaving parental household and the effect of these movements may exacerbate social disparities (McLanahan 2004). Studies found that children in disrupted families have poorer relationship with 3