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

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 nevermarried 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.