Data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 2,957) are used to examine partnership instability and children’s wellbeing during the transition to elementary school. We find that coresidential transitions are related to externalizing, attention, and social problems. Mothers’...

Employment rates for married and unmarried mothers in the United States crossed over in the early 1990s, leading to questions about how marital status and family structure affect contemporary maternal employment. A mother's family structure whether she is married, cohabiting or living without a...

Using a unique set of longitudinal qualitative interviews with parents who participated in the Fragile Families Study in Oakland, California, this paper examines the situations in which disadvantaged fathers shared caretaking responsibilities with mothers in the first four years of their...

This paper uses Fragile Families data to examine (1) the degree of correspondence between measures of cohabitation, (2) the prevalence of ‘part-time’ cohabitation, and (3) the extent to which the characteristics associated with cohabiting relationship are sensitive to how part-time...

High rates of nonmarital childbearing combined with high rates of instability and repartnering in nonmarital relationships portend that a large proportion of children born to unmarried mothers can expect to spend time with a ‘social father.’ This paper uses data from the Fragile Families and...

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...