Sara McLanahan: Pioneering scholar focused on families and the wellbeing of children

Sara McLanahan, a pioneer in studying families, inequality, and public policy, passed away on December 31, 2021, in New York City, just a few days after her 81st birthday. Over the course of her career, Sara made foundational contributions toward understanding family circumstances and family change, illuminating inequalities in children’s experiences, and improving public policy to enhance the wellbeing of children. Sara was among the first to provide rigorous evidence about the implications of rising divorce and single parenthood for children as both phenomena surged in the 1970s and 1980s. A single mother herself, she was skeptical of early conjectures that children of single mothers fared worse than those with two (married) parents, and she set out to collect the evidence to prove that idea wrong. Instead, her examination of four national datasets over more than a decade led her to determine that all else equal, children of single parents were disadvantaged on a range of outcomes compared to their counterparts with two parents, largely because of differences in economic resources and parental time. Her 1994 book with Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps (1), which won both the Otis Dudley Duncan Award and the Goode Distinguished Publication Award from the American Sociological Association, remains a classic in family and child research today. This is just one example of Sara’s intellectual integrity and her commitment to finding the truth via social scientific research, no matter where the evidence leads. As family formation continued to change, she turned her attention to understanding the dramatic rise in nonmarital childbearing. She launched in 1998 (with her spouse Irv Garfinkel and colleague Ron Mincy, both now at Columbia University) a prescient new (and ongoing) study focused on unmarried parents and their children (with a comparison group of married parents): the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (2). This innovative study gathered data on mothers just after they had given birth to a focal child, while still in the hospital, and then followed them (and their children and the baby’s fathers) for more than two decades (the 22-year follow-up survey is currently in progress). While many policymakers assumed that unmarried parents getting married was the key for children in such families to be better off, McLanahan and colleagues showed that unmarried and married parents differed on a host of characteristics, and it was these characteristics (e.g., older age, higher education, more stable employment, greater relational maturity) that provided greater advantages for children of married parents as opposed to marital status per se. She also highlighted the importance of family stability for children’s wellbeing. To date, nearly 1,000 papers have been published using the Fragile Families data, and the study has spurred multiple ancillary studies focused on topics such as couple relationships (using qualitative data), child care and teachers, genetics/DNA, brain development, machine learning and data prediction, sleep, and cardiovascular health, as well as a new study now following the third generation (the children of the focal children). By the 2000s, Sara became increasingly aware of the rising inequality in children’s experiences as a result of different family patterns by socioeconomic status. Her 2004 address as President of the Population Association of America highlighted the “diverging destinies” for children in recent decades; she observed that children of more highly educated parents were more likely to be in stable, married families, thereby gaining resources in terms of parents’ time and money, as compared to children of less-educated parents. She argued that this inequality should be of concern to society and that government should do more to ameliorate the circumstances for disadvantaged children and to obviate the emerging inequalities. Attention to the implications of family research for public policy—and a persistent focus on working to improve children’s wellbeing—were hallmarks of Sara’s career. In 2004, she became Editor-in-Chief of The Future of Children, an applied journal focused on making child and family research accessible to policymakers, a collaboration between Princeton University and the Brookings Institution. Sara McLanahan. Image credit: Sameer A. Khan (photographer).