Intergenerational Patterns of Union Formation and Marital Quality:
New Results from the NSFH 3
Sharon Sassler
Associate Professor
Department of Policy Analysis & Management
, CornellUniversity
120 Martha Van Rensselaer Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
607-254-6551
Anna Cunningham,
Department of Sociology
The OhioStateUniversity
300 Bricker Hall
Columbus, OH 43210
Daniel T. Lichter
Department of Policy Analysis & Management,
CornellUniversity
120 Martha Van Rensselaer Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
July 15, 2006
A draft of this paper was presented at the International Conference on Children and Divorce, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, July 27, 2006 Please direct correspondence to Sharon Sassler, Department of Policy Analysis and Management, 134 MVR Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, or to .
Intergenerational Patterns of Union Formation and Marital Quality:
New Results from the NSFH 3
Unprecedented changes in union formation and dissolution have transformed American family lifeover the last three decades (Cherlin 2004; Lichter and Qian 2004). Young adults today represent the first full generationof Americans to experience – as growing children -- the high rates of marital instability and remarriage of their parents during the so-called “divorce revolution” (and beyond). These young adults were exposed during childhood toseveral emergingalternatives to traditional family life and were often challenged economically and psychosociallyby unstable and sometimes chaotic living arrangements. Many were born to and reared by single mothers. Others lived with theircohabiting parents and partners, while still other young adults faced the prospect of splitting their time and emotional energy between two new stepfamilies – including stepparents and step-siblings -- when their parents remarriedfollowing a divorce (Bumpass, Sweet, and Cherlin 1991; Goldscheider and Sassler 2006; Manning and Lichter 1996). Indeed, about 40 percent of American children who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s experienced the breakup of their parents’ marriages (Furstenberg and Cherlin 1991). Estimates of the percentage of children expected to live with a cohabiting mother during childhood rangesbetween 25and 40 percent(Bumpass and Lu 2000; Graefe and Lichter 1999; Heuveline and Timberlake 2004).
Today’s young adults are now forming intimate relationships of their own – dating, cohabiting, and getting married – and many have high hopes for a stable and healthy family life (Sassler and Cunningham 2004; Thornton and Young-DeMarco 2001; Waller and McLanahan 2005). Are young adults today doomed to reproduce the marriage and disruptive family experiences of their parents, or have their childhood experiences sensitized them to the difficulties of finding a compatible partner and made them more cautious and perhaps more “successful” in finding a lifelong partner? In this paper, we examine the question of whether young adults who experienced their parents’ divorce and subsequent relationships have qualitatively different relationship trajectories than those who spent their childhood living with both biological (or adoptive) parents in traditional married-couple families. Unlike most previous studies (e.g., Teachman 2002, 2003), we distinguish specifically between various types of relationships that can follow upon a divorce, such as cohabitation orremarriage, as well asparents who have no coresidential relationships. We also evaluate -- for our sample of young adults currently in relationships whose parents were married at the initial survey -- the association between their parents’ relationship and marriage quality and their own union formation patterns and the quality of theirintimate relationships. This allows us to directly look at whether the adult children who grew up in disrupted or conflicted families are more likely to have unstable or unhealthy relationships themselves.
Longitudinal and intergenerational data on union formation and dissolution are required to achieve our objectives. Fortunately, such information is now available on the adult focal children included in the newly released wave III of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), which wascollected in 2002. These data provide unusually rich information on early adult relationships, and can be linked to previously-collected informationon parents and children from Waves I and II of the NSFH (collected in 1987-88 and 1992, respectively). These early waves also provide self-reported rather than proxy information by the parents on their own relationship and marital histories and the quality of their relationships. These data also revealthe changing family living conditions of focal children, as well as focal child reports on many different aspects of childhood well-being and adolescent development (e.g., esteem). Our study expands current research on the intergenerational reproduction of marriage and marital quality (and potentially inequality) by documenting the association between a myriad of parental relationship measures and the later union formation patterns and relationship quality of their adult children. This topic is especially timely in light of state welfare reform initiatives that aim to promote “healthy marriages” and sever the intergenerational patterns that often link poverty and welfare dependency from one generation to the next (Cherlin 2004; Lichter, Graefe, and Brown 2003).
AssociationsBetween Origin Family Instability and Young Adult Outcomes
Divorce is more common in the United States than in most other developed nations (Martin and Kats 2003). Demographers estimate that about half of first marriages initiated in the 1990s would end in divorce (Schoen and Standish 2001; Fields and Mosher 200), although recent reports suggest that levels are declining (Goldstein 1999). Such dramatic changes in the stability of marital unions haveelevated public policy concerns regarding the potential implications of high rates of union dissolution in the past on current marriage patterns, i.e., concerns about demographic momentum built into current family patterns through the intergenerational reproduction of divorce and family instability (Amato 1996, 2000; McLanahan and Sandefur 1994; Teachman 2002). This is an important issue. Although the proportion of marriages involving children has declined in recent years, slightly more than half of all divorces involve minor children and some demographic estimates indicate that over 1 million children are affected each year by the divorce of their parents.
The emerging consensus is that healthy, stable marriages improve family functioning, promotepositive developmental outcomes among children, and provide day-to-day examples on which young adults can model their own intimate relationships (Amato and Booth 1997; Brotherson and Duncan 2004; Moore et al. 2002). In fact, children who grow up with both biological parents fare better on average than those whose parents were never married or who divorced and remarried (Amato and Cheadle 2005; Moore et al. 2002; Teachman 2002). They score higher on measures of psychological adjustment, self esteem, and academic success (Amato 2005; Amato and Bruce 1991; Amato and Keith 1991; McLanahan and Sandefur 1994; Ross and Mirowsky 1999), and are less likely to be involved in precocious adolescent sexual activity or experiencenon-marital teenchildbearing (Wu and Martinson 1993). Children from married, biological parent families also experience fewer behavioral and academic difficulties than do children from either cohabiting step-parent families (Manning and Lamb 2003) or married step-parent families (Brown 2004; Morrison and Ritualo 2000). These short-term effects potentially have important longer-term implications for marriage and family life. One implication seems clear: As young adults,the children of divorced parents are expected to experience more unstable relationships themselves and be less satisfied with their own intimate relationships.
Indeed, research clearly documents a strong statistical association between having experienced a parental marital disruption and young adults’ subsequent union dissolution (Amato 1996; Cherlin, Kiernan, and Lindsay Chase-Lansdale 1995; Kiernan 1992; McLanahan and Sandefur 1994; Wolfinger 2000). Interpretation is more difficult. Indeed, our understanding of the complex – possibly causal -- connections between childhood family experiences and the formation and stability of young adult relationshipsnevertheless remain incomplete. For example, the children of divorce may share characteristics with their parents that place them at greater risk themselves of divorce and family instabilityand that are difficult to disentangle causally from family and parental effects (e.g., parenting practices, role modeling, etc.). These include biological or genetic factors (e.g., mental health conditions, such as depression, that have well-documented genetic components) and demographic and socioeconomic conditions (e.g., race and education) that are passed on from parental to filial generations (e.g., Plotnick 2005). Biology and intergenerational SES rather than divorce, per se, may be responsible for linking the marriage and family experiences of parental and filial generations.
Our understanding of intergenerational linkages also is made difficult by overly simplistic and often binary conceptions of family change, such as whether children have ever experienced a parental divorce. The fact is that mostdivorced parents (of reproductive age)quickly enter into new post-divorce relationships that oftenlead them back to the altar. Most remarriages today are preceded by cohabitation. Indeed, cohabitation rates among the divorced population exceed rates among the never-married; for many, cohabitationapparently has become an alternative to marriage, especially among couples without co-residential children (Bumpass, Sweet, and Cherlin 1991; Goldscheider and Sassler 2006; Stewart 2001; Stewart, Manning, and Smock 2003). At the same time, few empirical studies have systematically evaluated whether the kinds of unions parents enter into following marital disruption have divergent effects on children’s own relationshipsand patterns of union formation.
Not all intimate relationships are equivalent; recent research suggests that some forms of parental relationships result in more advantageous outcomes for offspring (Aquilino 1996; Cooksey 1997; Dunifon and Kowaleski-Jones 2002; Morrison and Ritualo 2000). For example, parental remarriage is associated with more favorable long-term economic and behavioral outcomes for children than is cohabitation (Dunifon and Kowaleski-Jones 2002; Morrison and Ritualo 2000), but this may simply reflect the fact that the children in a growing share of cohabiting couple families are biologically related to both partners (Manning and Lamb 2003). Cohabitation has been an increasing context for childbearing and childrearing. Whether the experience of parental cohabitationduring childhood can explain patterns of union choice among young adults today, however, requires additional study. One argument, of course, is that cohabitation among adult children is less stigmatized or negatively sanctioned by parents if parents themselves have previously cohabited.
Studies also show that experiencing family disruption often accelerates the departure from the parental home (Goldscheider and Goldscheider 1998). This may in part account for the bifurcated marriage patterns of children of divorced parents (Wolfinger 2000); children whose parents divorced are slightly less likely to marry than those from intact families but they are more likely to evidence either earlier or later entrance into marital unions (Teachman 2003; Wolfinger 2000). They are also more likely to divorce themselves, as are those who are born to an unmarried mother (Teachman 2000). But exposure to marital disruption shapes young adults’ union transitions well before the stage of marital dissolution. Both Clarkberg (1999) and Sassler and Goldscheider (2004) find that growing up with divorced parents significantly reduced the odds of entering into marriage relative to cohabitation or remaining single (see also Thornton 1991). Women who experience parental divorce are also more likely to cohabit before marriage (Teachman 2004). The impact of experiencing a parental remarriage is understudied, though Goldscheider and Sassler (2006) find that men who grew up in a step-family situation are more likely to replicate the experience themselves by entering into cohabiting unions with single mothers. Women who grew up with remarried parents, on the other hand, marry earlier, have a greater likelihood of experiencing a teen birth, and acquire a greater number of risk factors for subsequent union dissolution than women who grew up in stable married families, or those who experienced a parental death (Teachman 2002).
As we have argued here, deleterious adolescent and early adult outcomes may be linked themselves to early adult family formation and marriage. The potential impacts and psychosocial pathways of the broad array of parental relationship experiences on adult children’s own relationships also are unclear. Perhaps not surprisingly, most previous research on the longer-term effects of parental union disruption has concentrated on easily-measured young adult outcomes, such as educational progression or achievement (Astone and McLanahan 1991; Downey 1995; Raley, Frisco, and Wildsmith 2005), early sexual activity and childbearing (McLanahan and Sandefur 1994; Wolfe and Haveman), or social and economic well-being (Dunifon and Kowaleski-Jones 2002; Manning and Lamb 2003; Lichter, Shanahan, and Gardener 2002).
While previous research on longer-term family outcomes has mostly examined intergenerational effects on marriage, cohabitation, and divorce, a smaller but growing body of research has focused on how experiences with poor quality parental relationships during childhood can shape young adults’ own romantic attachments and relationship quality (Amato and Booth 199?; Mellott, Qian, and Lichter 2005; Teachman 2002; Teachman 2003). For example, young adults who experienced parental conflict and divorce are themselves more likely to report marital problems and express lower levels of marital satisfaction (Amato 1996; McLeod 1991; Ross and Mirowsky 1999). Compared to those with continuously married parents, adult children of divorce are more likely to currently be in unhappy relationships (Ross and Mirowsky 1999). Evaluations of the intergenerational association between parental and filial generations in either union type or quality remain scarce. And we know little about the specific pathways or mechanisms that link parental and filial patterns of union formation and quality. Until now, data limitations have generally precluded researchers from assessing how young adult’s experiences with and perceptions of their parents’ relationships shape their own relationship well-being.
THE CURRENT STUDY
Marriage and remarriage rates have declined precipitously over the past 25 years. Divorce rates are high by historical standards. And growing shares of young adults have lived with a romantic partner outside of marriage in the last few decades, so that cohabitation is now normative for today’s young adults (Bumpass and Lu 2000; individual calculations from the 2002 NSFG). Among contemporary young adults (as well as their parents), acceptance of living together is widespread (Thornton and Young-DeMarco 2001). Secular increases in cohabitation, as well as a dramatic rise in non-marital childbearing, provide young adults with a far more expansive array of union alternatives than might their origin family structure. Significantly, these demographic and family changes have occurred more rapidly among young adults who have themselves experienced the most disruptive family childhood experiences.
Our study addresses a straightforward question: How do young adults’ lived family experiences, social class background, and increasing array of romantic options shape the kinds of relationships they enter, and the quality of these unions? Clearly, the substantive implications of previous research seem straightforward. Exposure to different family forms has the putative effect of increasing young adults’ acceptance of lifestyle alternatives, and may subsequently shape their own relationship decision making. Parental attitudes and family-related behaviors provide a template for offspring to follow. The more strongly mothers value marriage and family, for example, the less likely daughters are to cohabit (Axinn and Thornton 1992, 1993), although mother’s assessments of marriage do not independently affect son’s likelihood of cohabiting. While most studies of transitions to marriage or divorce have focused on the effects of contemporaneous social conditions and processes (e.g., employment status, poverty), it seems clear that current family relationships are rooted – at least in part -- in young adults’ own childhood experiences.
DATA AND METHODS
Data are from the three waves of the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH). Initially conducted in 1987-1988, with a follow up survey in 1992-1994, the NSFH is a national probability sample of 13,008 individuals aged 19 and over, plus an over-sample of minorities, single parent families, recently married couples and cohabiting couples (Sweet, Bumpass & Call 1988). The third wave of data collection was completed in 2001-2002, when extensive interviews with the focal child of the main respondent were conducted (Sweet & Bumpass 2002). Our analysis are based on reports from focal children from wave 1, who at the time of the wave 3 interview were between the ages of 18 and 34. The final sample includes 1,865 focal children;[1] data on their parents’ union transitions and other personal and family attributes, drawn from the main respondent data gathered in the first two waves, are appended to the child’s information from wave 3.
We focus on two main outcomes for this analysis: the union status of focal children at wave 3, and how they assess various dimensions of the quality of their relationships (if they are currently in one) at that time. For our analysis of union type, we rely on the detailed life histories to identify young adults who are currently married, cohabiting, in a steady romantic (but non-coresidential) relationship, or are not currently in a romantic relationship. The analysis of focal children’s relationship quality proceeds in two stages. We construct three scales, described below, that measure various aspects of relationship quality (i.e., happiness, conflict, and expectations of divorce or relationship dissolution). We then explore how parental union transitions shape the relationships of focal children who are romantically involved as of Wave 3. This analysis excludes respondents who do not report having a steady romantic partner, leaving a sample size of 751women, and 556 men; some analyses relied on smaller samples, of 632 married and 274 cohabiting focal children. Finally, we replicate the analysis of focal children’s relationship quality, but limit the sample to children whose parents were married at the initial survey; this enables us to incorporate various measures of parents’ relationship quality at Wave 1, as a predictor of adult focalchildren’s assessments of their own relationships at Wave 3. The sample size for this group is 791, including 387 married, 134 cohabiting, and 270 steady dating focal children.