Children's well-being and varying degrees of family instability

Bowling Green, OH—September 29, 2010— A forthcoming issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family states that children today are less likely to be born into a "traditional" family structure, defined as two biological married parents. Growing numbers of children in the United States experience multiple family living arrangements during childhood. How these transitions affect the individual child's well-being needs to be fully addressed by researchers and policymakers alike. This article fully reviews the existing research from the past ten years on these topics in an effort to guide and inform current policy debates about the role of marriage in reducing poverty and improving child outcomes.

Author Susan L. Brown observed that, "Family instability appears to negatively affect a child's well-being in the short- and long-term. But researchers are still exploring why family instability can be detrimental. Is it because of the number of transitions children experience, the types of transitions, duration of time spent in diverse family environments, or some other factors?"

In her article Brown devotes special attention to new scholarship on unmarried, primarily low-income families, also the target of recent federal marriage initiatives, such as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children & Families Healthy Marriage Initiative. Brown noted that, "Child well-being is of critical importance. What is clear is that living arrangements for children are increasingly varied and complex, and family instability is typically not good for children. Children's family trajectories depend in part on their family structure at birth, as children born to unmarried mothers tend to experience greater family instability during childhood than do children born to married parents."

Moreover, Brown asserts that children born to unmarried parents are unlikely to experience parental marriage, and parental marriage does not necessarily improve child well-being for those born to unmarried mothers. She points out that according to the research these more subtle factors may have modest but enduring consequences for the child in the long-term. Brown concluded, "Marriage is not a panacea. It is possible that the negative outcomes are not due to family structure or family instability, but rather other unmeasured characteristics of the parents."

This study will be published in the October 2010 issue of The Journal of Marriage and Family. Members of the media may request a full-text version of this article by contactingscholarlynews@wiley.com.

To view an abstract of this article please visit http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2010.00750.x/abstract.

Article: "Marriage and Child Well-Being: Research and Policy Perspectives." Susan Brown. Journal of Marriage and Family; Published Online: September 29, 2010 (DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2010.00750.x).

Susan L. Brown is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University. She has completed numerous federally funded projects, presented, and published widely on topics of cohabitation, race, age, violence, economics, mental health, poverty, and family structure in marriage and relationships. She can be reached for questions at brownsl@bgsu.edu.

For more than 70 years, Journal of Marriage and Family (JMF) has been a leading research journal in the family field. JMF features original research and theory, research interpretation and reviews, and critical discussion concerning all aspects of marriage, other forms of close relationships, and families. In 2009, an institutional subscription to Journal of Marriage and Family (JMF) includes a subscription to Family Relations and Jorunal of Family Theory & Review.

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