In response to rise of incarceration, there is a burgeoning literature examining the consequences of incarceration on families. Research has suggested that incarceration negatively impacts the well-being of partners connected to men with an incarceration history. However, research examining the...

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned that non-marital childbearing and marital dissolution were undermining the progress of African Americans. I argue that what Moynihan identified as a race-specific problem in the 1960s has now become a classbased phenomena as well. Using data from a new...

Theories of family functioning suggest that childbearing with multiple partners may increase parenting stress due to changes in social and economic resources and the challenges associated with parenting across multiple households. These family processes may not be equally stressful for mothers...

Theoretical perspectives suggest a strong link between maternal mental health and parenting, which may facilitate the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage from depressed mothers to their children. In this paper, I extend prior research by using data from the Fragile Families and Child...

Qualitative research suggests that economically disadvantaged fathers experience considerable stress due to difficulty fulfilling the breadwinning ideal and workplace inflexibility that ignores their childcare responsibility. Yet, quantitative research on how employment and work-family conflict...

We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine couple how couple relationship quality and parental engagement are linked over children’s early years. Our sample includes 1,630 couples that are co-resident over years 1 to 3 and 1,376 over years 3 to 5 (1,196 over...

Although there has been extensive research on the effects of early maternal employment on children’s outcomes, there have been surprisingly few studies examining the relationship between early maternal school attendance and children’s well-being, despite the fact that a large percentage of...

We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study with a cross-lagged longitudinal design to examine how couple relationship quality and parental engagement with children affect one another during the first three years of a child’s life for both married and unmarried parents who...

This paper uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the association between multi-partnered fertility (MPF) when parents have children with more than one partner and parents‘ mental health, including Major Depressive Disorder, heavy episodic drinking, and...

We use data from the Fragile Families Study (N=1975) to examine the relationship between mothers’ partnership changes and parenting behavior during the first five years of their child’s life. We compare coresidential and dating transitions and recent and more distal transitions. We also...