Life course transitions of American children: parental cohabitation, marriage, and single motherhood.
We examine the life course transitions into and from families headed by unmarried cohabiting couples for a recent cohort of American children. Life table estimates, based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth mother-child files, indicate about one in four children will live in a family headed by a cohabiting couple sometime during childhood. Economic uncertainty is an important factor determining whether children in single-parent families subsequently share a residence with a mother's unmarried partner. Moreover, virtually all children in cohabiting-couple families will experience rapid subsequent changes in family status. Our estimates provide a point of departure for future work on children's exposure to parental cohabitation and its social and economic implications.
Graefe
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Population Research Institute, Pennsylvania State University, University Park 16802, USA. graefe@pop.psu.edu
Lichter
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D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002669:Child Welfare; D002675:Child, Preschool; D006304:Health Status; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D008016:Life Change Events; D015993:Life Tables; D016015:Logistic Models; D017533:Marital Status; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D014481:United States