A real inconvenient truth

“Recent evidence on the impact of these trends comes from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which is following a cohort of nearly 5,000 children born in large U.S. cities between 1998 and 2000. Roughly three-quarters of these children were born to unmarried parents. Just under 50 percent of the parents are black, while about 35 percent are Hispanic. Researchers interview parents and assess children every few years to learn about family dynamics and gauge the health and well-being of the participants.

“The study finds that couples who are cohabiting at the time of the child’s birth split up much sooner than couples who were married. Nearly half of cohabiting parents break up within five years of the child’s birth, compared to only 20 percent of married parents. Once a mother’s relationship with her baby’s father ends, she is likely to form relationships with new partners, and she typically has one or more children with a new partner. Of course, divorced mothers also form new partnerships and often have children with their new partners. But the interval before this occurs is usually longer among divorced mothers than among mothers who are cohabiting or living alone at the time of their child’s birth. Among the latter group, 61 percent live with a new partner and 11 percent live with three or more new partners before the child is five years old. Among mothers who are married at the time of a birth, those proportions are only 8 percent and 1 percent, respectively.

  

“High levels of instability and complexity have important consequences for children’s home environment and the quality of the parenting they receive. Both the departure of a father and the arrival of a mother’s new partner disrupt family routines and are stressful for most children, regardless of whether the father is married to their mother or merely cohabiting with her. A nonresident father may also be less willing to keep paying child support if he believes his payments will be shared with another man’s child. Such problems are magnified in families with several nonresident fathers.”

https://www.educationnext.org/was-moynihan-right/