Dramatic changes in family demography in the United States have led to increasing numbers of children living in “non-traditional” households. A large body of literature documents the association between living in a non-traditional family structure/familial instability and children’s...

There have been relatively few evaluations of the effect of private insurance and Medicaid on infant health, and results from previous studies are inconclusive. The objective of this study if to estimate the effect of private insurance coverage and Medicaid participation on birth weight and the...

This paper uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the frequency of parent-child interaction in several areas across a range of family types. Overall, we find that few individual characteristics of mothers or fathers are consistently associated with how often...

In 1996 the U.S. Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), substantially reducing a family’s rights to income support. PRWORA removed the entitlement to government-provided cash assistance and increased states’ incentives to reduce...

The associations between intimate partner violence (IPV) and mental health among adolescents and young adults were compared in the current study. The connections among marriage status, Latino heritage and abusive experiences were also analyzed. 672 women including 282 adolescents between the...

This paper offers a first template for assessing performance by national governments in guaranteeing disadvantaged groups of youngsters access to their rights, as enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Street children, who are among the most severely disadvantaged children...

Prior research linking family structure with parenting often confounds the effects of family structure with the effects of family instability. In this analysis, I use data from the Fragile Families Study (N= 3107) to answer two main questions: (a) Are there differences in maternal stress and...

Using the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study, this paper investigates how income volatility and union stability and transitions influence patterns in Food Stamp Program (FSP) participation among a sample of young families (n=1263). Multinomial logistic regression models suggest that...

This paper analyzes how variation in participant take-up rates affected the impacts of the New Hope project, a random-assignment, anti-poverty program. New Hope offered experimental members four benefits - child care subsidies, wage subsidies, health insurance, and, if needed, a temporary...

Using longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 1,162) and the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies (N = 1,308), we estimate associations between material and instrumental support available to unwed, low-income mothers and young children‘s...