Just Get Me to the Church: Assessing Policies to Promote Marriage among Fragile Families

This article examines alternative approaches to encourage family formation among fragile families, including higher cash benefits, more liberal acceptance of welfare applications, more effective child support enforcement, and efforts to increase education and employment of low-income parents. We examine these approaches by refining and expanding previous work on a generalized logit model of the mothers’ actual family formation outcomes, in a hierarchy that includes father absence, father involvement, cohabitation, and marriage. Refinements involve measurements of family formation that make our results more comparable to other studies and new controls for previous fertility with the father of the focal child and with another partner (multiple partner fertility). We estimate these models using interim data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being 12 month follow-up Survey. The results indicate that, unlike their effects on mature families, cash benefits increase the odds of family formation (short of marriage) among fragile families and effective child support enforcement increases the odds of marriage. However, the father’s employment status outweighs the effects of these traditional income security policies on family formation, because it affects outcomes all along the hierarchy, including marriage, and its effects are larger. Unlike previous research, our data on previous fertility enables us to separate the effects of previous children in common from multiple partner fertility on family formation. Both significantly affect family formation (though in opposite directions), but even after including these variables, blacks, who are more likely to bring children from previous unions into a new union, have substantially lower odds of cohabitation and marriage than non-Hispanic whites.

The M Word: The Rise and Fall of Interracial Coalitions On Fathers And Welfare Reform

Buoyed by the success of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), whose time limits and work requirements played a large role in the reduction of the welfare rolls, conservative advocates of welfare reform are now moving to ensure that our welfare system reflects traditional family values as well. Responding to this sentiment, the Bush Administration is encouraging states to use TANF to support marriage promotion efforts and the Administration's 2002 budget includes $100 million in support of demonstration projects to promote marriage (source). By contrast, the$60 million President Bush had committed to support efforts to promote responsible fatherhood, not restricted to marriage, has been pared back to $20 million, along with cutbacks in other domestic initiatives that are needed to pay for the "war against terrorism."

Advancing Postsecondary Success for Men of Color through Policy and Systems Change

Completion of higher education is of particular value to men of color. Through this achievement, they unlock their own potential, improve their career options and lifetime earnings, and enable themselves to best contribute to their families and communities. Beyond individual benefits, completing a postsecondary education is important to the overall prosperity and vitality of our nation, better enabling communities to create, innovate, sustain, and persevere. The skills and experiences acquired through the completion of a higher education degree or credential help to strengthen the nation's labor force and economic systems and contribute to every part of our national fabric. Moreover, children whose parents hold postsecondary degrees have better health outcomes and educational advantages. Often, they maintain or improve upon the economic status of their parents. So, it stands to reason that an investment in increasing the number of boys and men of color who complete higher education is an investment in our future collective and societal well-being

Unmarried Fathers’ Earnings Trajectories: Does Partnership Status Matter?

Married men earn more than unmarried men. Previous research suggests that marriage itself causes some of the difference, but includes few men who fathered children out of wedlock. This paper asks whether increasing marriage (and possibly cohabitation) following a non-marital birth is likely to increase fathers’ earnings and labor supply. The analyses are based on a new birth cohort study the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study which follows unmarried parents for the first five years after their child’s birth. Results provide some support for the idea that increasing marriage will lead to increased fathers’ earnings.Cohabitation, marriage, income, men, males, earnings, income, children

Beyond Absenteeism: Father Incarceration and its Effects on Children’s Development

High rates of incarceration among American men, coupled with high rates of fatherhood among men in prison, have motivated recent research on the effects of parental imprisonment on children’s development. We contribute to this literature using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the effects of paternal incarceration on developmental and school readiness outcomes for approximately 3,000 urban children. We estimate cross-sectional and longitudinal regression models that control not only for fathers’ basic demographic characteristics and a rich set of potential confounders, but also for several measures of pre-incarceration child development, and family fixed effects. We find that paternal incarceration is positively associated with children’s externalizing problems at age five. Results are mixed with respect to attention problems, and we find some evidence that children of incarcerated fathers experience less anxiety than their peers. The observed effects of incarceration on child behavioral problems are significantly stronger than the effects of other forms of father absence, suggesting that children with incarcerated fathers may require specialized support from caretakers, teachers, and social service providers.Fragile families, childbearing, nonmarital childbearing, fartherhood, fathers, incarceration

Unmarried fathers' earnings trajectories: does partnership status matter?

Married men earn more than unmarried men. Previous research suggests that marriage itself "causes" some of the difference, but includes few men who fathered children out of wedlock. This paper asks whether increasing marriage (and possibly cohabitation) following a non-marital birth is likely to increase fathers' earnings and labor supply. The analyses are based on a new birth cohort study—the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study—which follows unmarried parents for the first five years after their child's birth. Results provide some support for the idea that increasing marriage will lead to increase

Beyond absenteeism : father incarceration and child development

High rates of incarceration among American men, coupled with high rates of fatherhood among men in prison, have motivated recent research on the effects of parental imprisonment on children's development. We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the relationship between paternal incarceration and developmental outcomes for approximately 3,000 urban children. We estimate cross-sectional and longitudinal regression models that control not only for fathers' basic demographic characteristics and a rich set of potential confounders, but also for several measures of pre-incarceration child development and family fixed effects. We find significant increases in aggressive behaviors among children whose fathers are incarcerated, and some evidence of increased attention problems. The estimated effects of paternal incarceration are stronger than those of other forms of father absence, suggesting that children with incarcerated fathers may require specialized support from caretakers, teachers, and social service providers. The estimated effects are stronger for children who lived with their fathers prior to incarceration, but are also significant for children of nonresident fathers, suggesting that incarceration places children at risk through family hardships including and beyond parent-child separation

Who Should Marry Whom?: Multiple Partner Fertility among New Parents

This paper documents the extent and correlates of multiple partner fertility among parents in the Fragile Families and Child Well-being Survey in order to assess the opportunities and challenges that await marriage promotion policies which are attracting the attention of policy makers. We find that the majority of mothers who responded to the baseline and 12-month follow-up surveys are not first time mothers and the majority of mothers with two or more children have had at least one child with someone other than the father of their newborn. According to mothers' reports, fathers are equally likely to exhibit multiple partner fertility. While the descriptive analysis cannot speak to causation, our results are certainly consistent with the hypothesis that multiple partner fertility reduces the probability of marriage for mothers and fathers. Multiple partner fertility is rare among teenaged mothers, but fairly high among African American mothers and fathers, which may help to explain the low-marriage probabilities. Our results suggest that marriage promotion strategies will have their greatest opportunity among unwed mothers in their early twenties and the fathers of their children, but high rates of multiple partner fertility are expected to reduce the effective of such efforts among African Americans.