In an age when cohabitation and divorce are common,
single parents concerned about the developmental health of
their children may want to choose new partners slowly and
deliberately, new research from The Johns Hopkins
University suggests.
The reason for taking your time? The more transitions
children go through in their living situation, the more
likely they are to act out, Johns Hopkins sociologists Paula
Fomby and Andrew Cherlin report. They also found that the
effect of family upheaval on children varies by race.
In their paper "Family Instability and Child
Well-Being," published in the April issue of the
American Sociological Review, Fomby and Cherlin note
that with each breakup, divorce, remarriage or new
cohabitation, there is a period of adjustment as parents,
partners and children establish their places in a new
family setting. Studying a nationally representative sample
of mothers and their children, the researchers found that
children who go through frequent transitions are more
likely to have behavioral problems than children raised in
stable two-parent families and maybe even more than those
in stable single-parent families.
Looking at children's scores on a mother-reported
assessment of behavior problems with a mean of 100 and a
standard deviation of 15 (similar to how an IQ test is
scored), the authors found that a child who experienced
three transitions would have a behavior problems score
about six points higher than a child who had experienced no
transitions. Experiencing multiple transitions was also
associated with children's more frequent delinquent
behavior, including vandalism, theft and truancy.
"Children are affected by disruption and changes in
family structure as well as by the type of family
structures they experience," said Fomby, an associate
research scientist in the Krieger School of Arts and
Sciences' Sociology Department. "To the extent that family
instability has an independent effect on children's
well-being, a significant reinterpretation of the effects
of family structure on children's well-being may be
warranted."
The authors also observed that children who
experienced multiple transitions in family structure had
lower average scores on tests of mathematics and reading
skills. That problem was explained, however, by the
mothers' own educational achievement and cognitive ability,
assessed when they were teenagers or young adults.
Fomby and Cherlin, the Benjamin H. Griswold III
Professor of Public Policy in the Sociology Department,
analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Survey of
Youth and its mother-child supplement, the Children of
NLSY, a 21-year panel study of women and their children.
The children were between the ages of 5 and 14. The
researchers used a cognitive achievement test, a
mother-reported scale of their children's behavior problems
and, for 10- to 14-year-olds, a self-reported scale of
delinquent behavior. They also counted the number of
marital and co-habitational transitions a child had
experienced.
Changes at home seem to have a stronger negative
impact on white children than on black children, the
researchers found. Fomby and Cherlin observed a consistent
connection between family instability and white children's
behavior problems and cognitive achievement, but they found
no such link for black children. One reason for this
difference could be that the black children in the study
were more likely to have extended families nearby for
emotional support, the researchers wrote. The restrictions
of their sample set may also have affected the outcome: The
researchers exclusively studied children born to women who
were between 21 and 38 years old at the child's birth, and
black women tend to begin having children at a younger age
than white women, they said.
For both white and black children, Fomby and Cherlin
found a persistent association between living in a
mother-only household during the child's first four years
and mother-reported behavior problems and, for white
children, reading recognition.
"Family instability does appear to have a causal role
in determining whether white children exhibit more behavior
problems," Fomby said. "But for both white and black
children, other dimensions of family structure, like being
born to a single parent or living with a step-parent, also
have persistent effects. Instability isn't the whole story,
but looking at change tells us more about what explains
children's behavioral development than what we would see by
looking at a cross-section."
The study was funded by the National Institute of
Child Health and Human Development, a part of the National
Institutes of Health.