Reflections on “Family Structure and Child Well-Being: Economic Resources vs. Parental Socialization”

Our Paper

In Thomson, Hanson and McLanahan (1994), we investigated the relative importance of two types of parental resources – time and money – for explaining the association between family structure and children’s academic and socioemotional development. Family structure was classified as married-parent, stepparent, cohabiting parent, divorced-mother and never-married mother families. The primary innovations of the study were as follows: (1. to use nationally representative data – the U.S. National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) – to examine the association between family structure and child well-being, and (2. to include a more diverse set of family structures than had been examined in the past, including cohabiting stepparent families and families headed by never-married mothers. The NSFH had over-sampled single-parent families, cohabiting couples, and stepfamilies, providing for the first time sufficient numbers of observations for these less common but theoretically meaningful family types.

Briefly, our findings showed that cohabiting parents were closer to single parent families than married parent families in terms of economic disadvantage. We also found that differences in economic resources accounted for much more of the disadvantage associated with non-traditional family structures than differences in parenting, especially differences between single parent families and married parent families. Parenting differences, as measured in our data, accounted for only a small part of the differences associated with family structure.

Our article was part of an ongoing stream of research to understand and explain the well-established association between family structure and child well-being. The fact that much subsequent research confirmed many of our findings is due to the substantial body of theory and empirical research upon which our study was built. As members of the design team for the National Survey of Families and Households, we had worked to ensure that all of the elements for the study were in place and did our best to ensure that gaps in prior data were filled. We view this study, however, as one in a series of incremental steps toward a fuller understanding of family transitions and child well-being. It simplified but clearly articulated what had been viewed as the two primary mechanisms that might account for differences among families – time and money. The simplification may be part of the article’s popularity as a referent point for subsequent research that has gone well beyond in both theory and methods. The distinctions we were able to make among cohabiting and married stepfamilies and between never-married and ever-married mothers also provided stepping stones to more extensive and nuanced research.

Research on family structure has expanded dramatically during the past two decades, in part because of the proliferation of different family forms and in part because of the availability of new longitudinal studies that follow families and children over time. The new body of research presents a much more detailed and more complicated picture of the types of families in which children grow up and the family conditions and processes that are associated with healthy child development. In the discussion below, we describe some of the most important ideas and concerns that have arisen and how they extend our original findings.

The Importance of Cohabitation

When the paper was written, researchers were focused on single parenthood created by divorce and stepparent families created through remarriage. Since then, divorce rates have leveled off and the flow into single motherhood and new partnerships is driven more by nonmarital births, an increasing proportion of which are to cohabitating parents (Bumpass and Lu 2000; Graefe and Lichter 1999). Accordingly, more recent surveys, especially those that follow parents and children over time, allow researchers to identify not only cohabiting stepfamilies but also to distinguish cohabiting biological parents from married biological parents as well as from cohabiting or married stepfamilies.

Most subsequent research confirms our finding that children living with their mother and her cohabiting partner have the poorest outcomes, or are more similar to children living with single mothers than to children living with a married stepparent (Sweeney 2010). As we found, these differences are not completely...