Marriage following the birth of a child among cohabiting and visiting parents

Approximately half of nonmarital births are to mothers in cohabiting relationships, and an additional 30% are to mothers in visiting relationships. I use data (N = 1,945) from the Fragile Families Study to investigate whether the determinants of marriage in the year following a child's birth are similar for cohabiting and visiting parents. The results show that mothers' education is predictive of marriage for cohabiting parents, whereas mothers' earnings are predictive of marriage for visiting parents. The findings imply that visiting mothers place a greater emphasis on economic independence and sufficient resources to establish an independent household before transitioning to marriage. No differences in the association of relationship quality or attitudes and marriage are found. Key Words: cohabitation, marriage, union formation. As a result of large demographic shifts in families, a significant proportion of children are born to unmarried mothers who remain romantically involved with their child's father. Approximately one third of all children are born to unmarried mothers (Hamilton, Martin, & Sutton, 2003), yet many of these mothers are not living alone. In the mid 1990s, 39% of all nonmarital births were to mothers living with their child's father (Bumpass & Lu, 2000). As cohabitation has increased, the estimates of births to unmarried cohabiting mothers are now as high as 50% in large urban areas. Moreover, an additional 30% of nonmarital births are to mothers who are dating their child's father, but living separately (McLanahan & Garfinkel, 2002). Researchers and policymakers are particularly interested in these unmarried families because unmarried parents tend to have fewer economic resources (Manning & Brown, 2003) and are less stable (Manning, Smock, & Majumbar, 2004) than married parent families, and children living with unmarried parents are at a higher risk of poverty and poor academic and social development (McLanahan & Sandefur, 1994). Encouraging marriage among these fragile families in the hopes that marriage will benefit the parents and children has become a major policy focus in the new welfare legislation. Moreover, researchers have long been interested in the determinants of marriage because of the central role that the institution of marriage plays in our society. Despite the extensive body of literature on the determinants of marriage in general (see Fein, Burstein, Fein, & Lindberg, 2003 for a review), surprisingly little research has focused exclusively on marriage between the biological parents of a new child, or on marriage among low-income families. Among lesser educated Americans, there has been a decoupling of marriage and childbearing over the past several decades that has not occurred among higher educated adults (Ellwood & Jencks, 2002). This divergence in fertility and marital behavior indicates that low-income unmarried parents may face distinct determinants of marriage. A recent study that used a large birth cohort sample of predominantly low-income unmarried parents living in large urban areas examined the factors associated with marriage within a year following the birth of a child (Carlson, McLanahan, & England, 2004). Their findings suggest that mothers' education, positive attitudes toward marriage, and stronger emotional support are all positively associated with marriage, whereas gender distrust decreases the odds of marriage. The inclusion of human capital, relational quality, and attitudinal-based factors in one analysis is a significant step forward in this field of research. A limitation is that their analysis does not interact the parents' living arrangement at their child's birth with each of these domains. Therefore, a question raised by their study is whether these factors apply similarly to mothers who are living with their child's father, as compared with mothers who are dating their child's father (referred to as visitors). …