In an age when cohabitation and divorce are common, single parents concerned about the developmental health of their children may want to choose new partners slowly and deliberately, new research from The Johns Hopkins University suggests.
The reason for taking your time? The more transitions children go through in their living situation, the more likely they are to act out, Johns Hopkins sociologists Paula Fomby and Andrew Cherlin report. They also found that the effect of family upheaval on children varies by race.
In their paper, "Family Instability and Child Well- Being," published in the April issue of the American Sociological Review, Fomby and Cherlin note that with each breakup, divorce, remarriage or new cohabitation, there is a period of adjustment as parents, partners, and children establish their places in a new family setting. Studying a nationally representative sample of mothers and their children, the researchers found that children who go through frequent transitions are more likely to have behavioral problems than children raised in stable two- parent families and maybe even more than those in stable single-parent families.
Looking at children's scores on a mother-reported assessment of behavior problems with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 (similar to how an IQ test is scored), the authors found that a child who experienced three transitions would have a behavior problems score about 6 points higher compared to a child who had experienced no transitions. Experiencing multiple transitions was also associated with children's more frequent delinquent behavior, including vandalism, theft and truancy.
"Children are affected by disruption and changes in family structure as well as by the type of family structures they experience," said Fomby, an associate research scientist in the Sociology Department at Johns Hopkins. "To the extent that family instability has an independent effect on children's well- being, a significant reinterpretation of the effects of family structure on children's well-being may be warranted."
The authors also observed that children who experienced multiple transitions in family structure had lower average scores on tests of mathematics and reading skills. That problem was explained, however, by the mothers' own educational achievement and cognitive ability, assessed when they were teenagers or young adults.
Fomby and Cherlin, the university's Benjamin H. Griswold III Professor of Public Policy, analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and its mother- child supplement, the Children of NLSY, a 21-year panel study of women and their children. The children they studied were between the ages of 5 and 14 in 2000. They used a cognitive achievement test, a mother-reported scale of their children's behavior problems and, for 10- to 14-year-olds, a self-reported scale of delinquent behavior. They also counted the number of marital and cohabitational transitions a child had experienced.