Family Structure and Children’s Cognitive Development

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  In Refereed Roundtable (60 min): Table 14: Family Structures

Abstract

Previous research on family structure and child development has largely focused on the disadvantages faced by children in single and cohabiting families compared to children in married families. However, we know less about how different family types within the broad categories of married, cohabiting and single are associated with child outcomes. In this paper, we use the Kindergarten Cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K) to analyze children’s cognitive development between kindergarten and eighth grade. We first replicated previous between-child comparisons of children in different family structures and then estimated within-child fixed effects models of cognitive outcomes. Our fixed effects analyses of children’s reading and math scores showed no significant differences between children in single mother and married biological parent families. Children living in cohabiting or married stepfamilies fared worse in their reading test scores and children living in cohabiting stepfamilies fared worse in their math test scores, in comparison to children in single mother families. We found however, that the negative association between living in a married or cohabiting stepfamily and reading test scores was moderated by the presence of a college-educated mother.

Authors

• Kristen Schultz Lee, University at Buffalo

• Julie E. Artis, DePaul University

• Sibo Zhao, Central University of Finance and Economics

• Yaqi Yuan, Wake Forest University