Daddies, Devotion, and Dollars How Do They Matter for Youth?

I Introduction THE NONTRADITIONAL FAMILY is becoming the norm. For example, in 1988 approximately 35% of eighth graders lived in homes that were not headed by two biological parents (see Table 1), up from 25% in 1970 (Statistical Abstract of the United States 1996). What is even more striking is that less than 40% of African-American children have two biological parents in the household. Children who do not grow up living with both biological parents are more likely to drop out of high school, have children out of wedlock, and be arrested. Such children are also less likely to attend college or hold a good job. While the mechanisms underlying these disadvantages remain subject to research, an understanding of them is critical in developing public policies that can help children with a higher risk of negative outcomes. There are many theories that predict why, on average, children are disadvantaged in nontraditional families. For example, children in single-parent homes live in families with lower average incomes, are more likely to suffer school and/or residential dislocation, and suffer more sexual abuse (Acock and Demo 1994; Amato, Loomis, and Booth 1995: Biblarz, Raftery, and Bucur 1997; Coleman 1994; Forehand, Long, and Brody 1988; Garasky 1995; McLanahan 1985; McLanahan and Sandefeur 1994; Simons 1996). The quality of parenting may also suffer, where quality of parenting is defined as time spent with children and the level of parental involvement in their children's education and in their children's other activities (Acock and Demo 1994; Simons 1996; Coleman 1994; Downey 1995). One can infer from these studies that one reason nontraditional families fail is due to a reduction in "quality time" spent with their children. This study uses the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 to examine the importance of two possible causal channels by which children in nontraditional families are disadvantaged: low parental income and lack of time or resources to devote to helping children by activities such as volunteering in schools and participating in extracurricular activities with them (parental involvement). The NELS is sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics and carried out by the Bureau of the Census. The NELS is designed to provide trend data about critical transitions experienced by young people as they develop, attend school, and embark on their careers. The base year (1988) survey was a multifaceted ,study with questionnaires for students, teachers, parents, and schools. Due to the multiple questionnaires, these data are advantageous because they contain rich measures of the characteristics of youth, their schools, and their parents. These features allow us to control for many aspects of family background that the hypotheses mentioned above suggest are important, Therefore, this research is subject to little of the biases due to omission of key variables that other studies have been forced to work around due to data constraints. We have multiple measures of several of the key constructs, which reduces problems of measurement error. We also examine multiple outcomes, which permits us to identify how income and parental involvement may affect education attainment differently than out-of-wedlock fertility. Most past research has used statistical techniques that assume that predetermined variables such as race and maternal education do not affect youth, in part due to their effects on family structure (e.g., Astone and McLanahan 1991; Downey 1995). This strong assumption can hide the true effects of income and parental involvement. Similarly, most past research has used statistical techniques that ignore how income can partly proxy for unobserved aspects of the family. This strong assumption can overstate the effects of income as a channel for why family structure matters. We examine how relaxing these assumptions changes the results. …