California Center for Population Research

Using new data from the third wave of the National Survey of Families and Households, we examine the influence of detailed and time-varying measures of family life on children’s academic achievement, substance use, and early family formation and dissolution. First, focusing on adolescent family experiences, we compare young adult outcomes of children exposed to parental conflict in biological two-parent families, relative to those living in step and single-parent families. Next, following younger children who were in the parental home over the course of two waves of data collection, we model stability and change in family structure and parental conflict between early childhood and adolescence. We find that exposure to parental conflict in adolescence is related to young adult outcomes, often in ways that are indistinguishable from living in a step or single-parent family. Further, we find that sustained high conflict and marital disruption are related in similar ways to young adult outcomes, irrespective of levels of pre-disruption conflict. Conflict does not appear to explain the association between marital disruption and child outcomes, nor does it appear to moderate the association. While children tend to fare better living with two biological married parents, it is clear that advantages are not equally shared by all.