Parental Cohabitation

As children are spending more of lives in cohabiting parent families, it has become increasingly important to understand the implications of cohabitation for children's well-being. We use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to determine whether adolescents in cohabiting parent stepfamilies fare as well as adolescents living in married parent stepfamilies and whether teens in unmarried mother cohabiting families fare better or worse than children living with unmarried single mothers. We find that teens living with unmarried mothers are not advantaged or disadvantaged by their mother's cohabitation. Similarly, teenagers living in stepfamilies are often not advantaged or disadvantaged by their mother's cohabitation. However, adolescents living in cohabiting stepfamilies experience greater disadvantage in terms of delinquency and cognitive development than their peers living in married stepfamilies. These results have implications for debates about the importance of marriage for children. PARENTAL COHABITATION AND ADOLESCENT WELL-BEING An extensive literature exists that examines the importance of family structure (defined by marital status) and child well-being. Marital status acts as an indicator of the potential number of caretakers and may imply certain characteristics or qualities of the child’s family life. This emphasis on marital status was perhaps more appropriate when relatively few children lived in cohabiting unions. Recent estimates indicate that two-fifths of children are expected to spend some time in a cohabiting parent family (Bumpass and Lu 2000). Despite this shift in children’s experience in cohabitation, the research on the implications of cohabitation for children’s lives is relatively sparse. In this paper we examine the well-being of adolescents in cohabiting parent families. We focus on several aspects of well-being: behavior problems, school functioning, cognitive development, and school achievement. We address two key questions in this paper. First, do adolescents in cohabiting parent “stepfamilies” fare as well as adolescents living in married parent stepfamilies? We determine whether there is some benefit of marriage by evaluating whether children living with two married adults rather than two unmarried adults experience more positive outcomes. Second, do children in unmarried cohabiting mother families fare better or worse than children living with unmarried single mothers? Children whose mothers are cohabiting with a man who is not the child[ren]'s father are often classified as being with single 1 1 We use the term stepfamily to indicate adolescents living with one biological parent and the parental partner (cohabiting stepfamily) or parent's spouse (married stepfamily). This term refers to family structure and not marital status. unmarried mothers, but children living with their parent’s cohabiting partner may benefit from the instrumental and emotional resources that two adults can provide. On the other hand, there may be some negative experiences associated with living with an unrelated adult. For each question, we evaluate whether the effects of parental cohabitation are explained by economic resources, parenting practices, the couple’s relationship, and the adolescent’s relationship with their resident and nonresident parents. Given minority children’s greater likelihood of living with single and cohabiting parents, we evaluate whether there are race and ethnic differences in the effects of cohabitation on adolescent well-being. This paper builds on prior research and moves beyond prior work in several key ways. First, by employing a large data source (National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health) our analyses are based on a relatively large number of adolescents in cohabiting parent families. Also the large sample size affords us the opportunity to examine racial and ethnic differences in children's experiences in cohabiting parent families. Second, the rich nature of the data allows us to include potentially important mediating factors that represent family processes and may help account for any observed effects of family structure. Third, we are not limited to a single indicator of well-being and focus on measures of well-being that are appropriate for teenagers. Finally, to better understand the implications of cohabitation on child well-being we focus on family type comparisons based on similar household structure (stepfather) or mother's marital status (unmarried mothers). We contrast the well-being of adolescents in cohabiting stepparent families to single mother and married stepfather families.