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Abstract
The dramatic increase in non-marital childbearing represents one of the most important changes in family demography in recent decades. Scholars are still in the early stages of understanding the implications of such high rates of non-marital childbearing for family dynamics and child well-being. Despite research documenting high rates of relationship instability among unwed parents and ethnographic evidence suggesting that many unwed mothers break up with their children’s fathers and continue searching for romantic partners soon after a non-marital birth, previous research provides relatively little information about mothers’ re-partnering behaviors after a non-marital birth and the well-being of the mothers’ children in these families. This dissertation uses recent longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study to extend family demographers’ and sociologists’ understanding of maternal re-partnering in the years after a non-marital birth.
The dissertation is separated into three empirical chapters. In the first chapter, I document the prevalence of new partnership formation among unwed mothers, finding that approximately two-fifths of mothers who are eligible for forming a new partnership do so in the five years after a non-marital birth. This chapter also uses discrete-time logistic regression models to identify the significant predictors of maternal re-partnering, finding that maternal age, race/ethnicity, and financial need are all significantly related to the odds of a mother forming a new partnership after a non-marital birth. The second empirical chapter compares the human capital-related characteristics of mothers’ new partners with those of the same mothers’ former partners (the focal children’s biological fathers), finding that on average, when mothers re-partner, they tend to do so with men whose human capital attributes are at least as good as—and often better than—those of the children’s biological fathers. These longitudinal analyses are an improvement over previous studies in this area, which have largely relied upon cross-sectional comparisons. The final empirical chapter asks whether child-related involvement by mothers’ new partners is as beneficial for child well-being as involvement by biological fathers in other families. The findings suggest that engagement by resident new partners and biological fathers is equally, and positively, associated with young children’s behavioral and health outcomes and that frequent contact between a child and the child’s non-resident biological father does not diminish the positive association between new partner involvement and child well-being.
