Family Complexity and Parents’ Financial Support for Postsecondary Education

• In Event: 116 - Section on Children and Youth Paper Session. Family and Relationship Stability and Its Effects on Children & Youth

Abstract

ABSTRACT. We ask whether and how family complexity experience shapes the financial support parents provide for children’s postsecondary education during early adulthood. We focus on three dimensions of parents’ family formation behavior that results in children’s experience of family complexity: union instability, nonmarital fertility, and parents’ nonresidential status. Further, we assess parents’ background and baseline characteristics at a child’s birth to assess the extent to which parents’ selection into complex family organization explains its observed association with economic disadvantage and lower or less frequent inputs to children’s postsecondary education. We consider the totality of children’s experience of family organization and family economic resources from birth to age 17 for a cohort of contemporary young adults (born 1983-94). We use longitudinal data from the US Panel Study of Income Dyanmics (PSID) paired with the 2013 PSID Rosters and Transfers Module. Our analysis employs marginal structural models, a class of statistical methods that reduces bias in conventional regression-based estimates by adjusting for time-dependent confounding between family complexity and family economic resources.

Authors

• Paula W. Fomby, University of Michigan

• Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz, University of Michigan