Family Structure, Adult Transition, and Next Generation Parenting

I-Fen Lin, Bowling Green State University

Numerous studies have demonstrated that children in one-parent families fare worse than children in two-biological-parent families, regardless of social-demographic backgrounds. A majority of these studies focus on the consequences of family disruption on children's development or their transition to adulthood. Relatively little attention has been paid to the consequences on these children after they enter adulthood and become parents themselves. Part of this oversight is due to data limitations. Examining the long-term consequences of family disruption on offspring's own parenting behavior requires panel data with information not only about respondents' families of origin, but also about their families of procreation. In this paper, thirty years of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and data recently released from the 1997 Child Development Supplement are used to address one important question, "Does a non-traditional pathway to adulthood intensify the potential negative consequences of family disruption on next generation parenting?"