Can We Promote Child Well‐Being by Promoting Marriage?

This article uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Cohort Mother-Child files to explore the idea that child well-being can be improved by encouraging and enhancing parental marriage. I consider how children's living arrangements, the stability of parental marriages, and changes in living arrangements are related to children's behavior and cognitive test scores. Although there is some evidence that children living with their married parents, even parents in unstable marriages, have better outcomes than children living in certain nonmarital arrangements, the findings vary across domains and specifications, and the effect sizes are generally small. Thus, any benefits of policies aimed improving child well-being by encouraging and enhancing parental marriage are likely to be modest at best. Key Words: children, family policy, family structure, living arrangements, marriage, well-being. Conventional wisdom and considerable social science research hold that children who live with their married biological or adoptive parents fare better on a host of indicators and outcomes man children in any other living arrangement (e.g., McLanahan & Sandefur, 1994). In public policy circles, this convergence of ideology and research has given momentum to the marriage movement, policymakers, and advocates who believe that government should actively support "healthy" marriages. Indeed, under the Bush Administration's Healthy Marriage Initiative, the federal government will spend $150 million a year on research, policies, and programs aimed at promoting healthy marriages. The ultimate success of this translation of research findings to policy prescriptions depends on the answers to two key questions. First, if marriage promotion efforts are successful, children who otherwise would live in an alternative arrangement will live with married parents. Can one reasonably expect that children living in families formed as a result of marriage promotion will fare as well as their counterparts living with married parents today? second, for some children, moving into a married family represents a disruption in their living arrangement and perhaps a change in residence or the introduction of a stepparent, or both. Do such transitions have negative consequences for children that may offset some of the benefits of marriage? This article examines how the relationships between children's well-being and their living arrangements are affected by the stability of their parents' marriages and changes in their living arrangements using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY-79) Cohort Mother-Child files. These data are ideal for this investigation because they contain detailed measures of child well-being, living arrangements, and other socioeconomic information, and these factors are measured at several points in time. The key innovation introduced here is using the future marital status of a child's mother to measure the stability of the relationship between married parents, and stability can be considered a proxy for marital quality. The home environment for children whose parents ultimately separate and divorce is likely to be of lower quality than that of children whose parents remain married. Including this measure of adult relationship stability helps to account for the possibility that children in marriage-promoted families may be in lower quality home environments than the average child with married parents today. Background A substantial amount of research exists on the relationship between living arrangements and children's well-being. The research considers a wide variety of outcomes for children across several different domains and explores different mechanisms by which living arrangements can affect these outcomes. Children's outcomes can be broadly grouped into three domains: cognitive, school based, and behavioral. Cognitive outcomes are usually measured by test scores (e. …