California Center for Population Research On-Line Working Paper Series INFLUENCES OF FAMILY STRUCTURE, CONFLICT, AND CHANGE ON TRANSITIONS TO ADULTHOOD

Using new data from the third wave of the National Survey of Families and Households, we examine the influence of detailed and time-varying measures of family life on children’s academic achievement, substance use, and early family formation and dissolution. First, focusing on adolescent family experiences, we compare young adult outcomes of children exposed to parental conflict in biological two-parent families, relative to those living in step and single-parent families. Next, following younger children who were in the parental home over the course of two waves of data collection, we model stability and change in family structure and parental conflict between early childhood and adolescence. We find that exposure to parental conflict in adolescence is related to young adult outcomes, often in ways that are indistinguishable from living in a step or single-parent family. Further, we find that sustained high conflict and marital disruption are related in similar ways to young adult outcomes, irrespective of levels of pre-disruption conflict. Conflict does not appear to explain the association between marital disruption and child outcomes, nor does it appear to moderate the association. While children tend to fare better living with two biological married parents, it is clear that advantages are not equally shared by all. The association between childhood family structure and child wellbeing is frequently cited: children who grow up with two married parents tend to fare better than others on a range of outcomes (for reviews see Amato 2005; McLanahan and Sandefur 1994; Sigle-Rushton and McLanahan 2004). Most studies of family structure compare children in single-parent and stepparent families to all children living with continuously married parents, irrespective of the level of parental conflict. Variation in two-parent families and its influence on children is relatively under-studied, although a growing body of work shows the importance of considering parental relationship quality and, in particular, conflict between parents. Exposure to parental conflict in childhood is associated with poorer child outcomes, including lower levels of psychological wellbeing, academic achievement, and relationship quality (Amato and Booth 1997; Amato and Sobolewski 2001; Musick and Bumpass 1999). From a social science perspective, understanding variation in married-parent families is important because it provides vital information about how family structure matters for children. Understanding how marriage matters is also important from a policy perspective. Marriage has emerged high on the policy agenda in the United States over the past decade (Nock 2005). Marriage promotion was an explicit goal of the 1996 welfare reform legislation, and Congress recently authorized $150 million a year under the Bush administration’s “Healthy Marriage Initiative” to encourage and strengthen marriage. While living with married parents may confer benefits to the average child, recognizing variation in marriage and its consequences for children is an essential task. In the presence of parental conflict, are children better off with two married parents? We rely on new data from the third wave of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) to address this question. We examine how family structure, conflict, and change