Mc Lanahan..Family Structure and the Reproduction of Inequalites

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Family Structure and theReproduction of InequalitiesSara McLanahan and Christine PercheskiOfce of Population Research, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544;email: [email protected], [email protected]

Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2008. 34:25776

First published online as a Review in Advance on April 17, 2008

The Annual Review of Sociology is online at soc.annualreviews.org

This articles doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.34.040507.134549

Copyright c 2008 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

0360-0572/08/0811-0257$20.00

Key Wordssingle parent, income, race, gender

Abstract Over the past four decades, income inequality has increased and fastructures have diversied. We argue that family structure has becoan important mechanism for the reproduction of class, race, andgendinequalities. We review studies of income inequality and family stture changes and nd a wide range of estimates of the correlation. discuss how increases in income inequality may lead to increassingle motherhood, particularly among less educated women. Sin

motherhood in turn decreases intergenerational economic mobility affecting childrens material resources and the parenting they expence. Because of the unequal distribution of family structure by and the negative effects of single motherhood, family structure chanexacerbate racial inequalities.Gender inequalities also increase as moers incur more child-related costs and fewer fathers experience famlife with children.

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INTRODUCTION The increase in income inequality during thelatter part of the twentieth century has stim-ulated interest in the extent to which othertypes of social inequalities may have increasedand the possible future implications. Changesin family formation are of particular interest.In 1960, only 6% of children in the UnitedStates lived with a single parent. Today overhalf of all children are expected to spend sometime in a single-parent family before reachingage18. Furthermore,the compositionofsingle-parent families, usually single-mother families,has shifted dramatically since 1960, from wid-owed mothers to divorced mothers and, most recently, never-married mothers (Uhlenberg1983).1 Families are the primary institution forraising children, and family experiences play animportantrole in shaping childrens life chances(Parsons 1949). Thus, major changes in family formation greatly interest sociologists study-ing inequality and intergenerational mobility.Indeed several recent books have argued that family structure is an important mechanismin the reproduction of poverty and inequality (Western 2006, Massey 2007).

This article reviews the evidence for thisclaim. We begin by looking at trends in sin-gle parenthood and income inequality over the

past 50 years andtheassociations between thesetrends. We also look at race and class differ-ences in family structure trends to measure theconcentration of single parenthood in particu-lar groups. We then review several argumentsfor the reasons that income inequality may af-fect familystructure, with attentiongiven to ev-idence of a causal link. Finally, we look at how family structure contributes to the reproduc-tion of inequalities by creating barriers to up- ward mobility and by exacerbating pre-existing

gender and racial disparities. Although we focus on trends and evidence

from theUnitedStates, theargument forfamily structure as a mechanism for the reproduction

1Uhlenberg (1983) discusses changes in the probability of marital disruption owing to divorce or death.

of inequalities is germane to other counas well. The extent to which family strucontributes to the reproduction of inequamay differ across countries, but the paththrough which it operates are likely to bsame.

THE TRENDSSince 1960, single motherhood and ininequality among families have incr(Figure 1 ). (For a recent review of the cand levels of economic inequality, see Nerman & Torche 2007.) These trends fosimilar but not identical patterns. Througthe1960s, income inequalitydeclined, reachistorically low levels in 1969. After 19come inequality increased steadily throug

1970s, leveled off in the late 1980s, incrrapidly again in the early 1990s, and leoff at the end of the 1990s.2 In contrast, simotherhood advanced continuously after 1

The extent of family structure change well beyond the increase in single motherh with diversication within as well as bethe categories of single mothers and maparents. Single-mother families, as meaby Census data, include both lone moand cohabiting couples. By 2000, almost

of all nonmarital births were to a cohabmother (McLanahan et al. 2001, Ken& Bumpass 2007), and between one-quand two-fths of children were expectexperience parental cohabitation during chood (Graefe & Lichter 1999, Hueveli Timberlake 2004, Kennedy & Bumpass 2 Two-parent married couple families also become more diverse. Between 11%18% of children now live with a stepparsome point during childhood (Bjorklund

2007).Changes in family structure have nocurred uniformly across population subgr

2 The Gini coefcients we report are from the Historiccome Tables of the U.S. Census Bureau and are slightferent than those reported by other researchers who sslight decline in income inequality in the late 1990s.

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instead there are notable differences by raceand education, with increases in single moth-erhood most pronounced among the most dis-advantaged groups (Ellwood & Jencks 2004).Unmarried mothers account for nearly two inthree births to mothers without a high schooleducation but only 9% of births to mothers

with a college education (Kennedy & Bumpass2007). These educational differences in non-marital birth rates combined with differencesin divorce and remarriage rates produce a sce-nario in which children with mothers in thebottom educational quartile are almost twice aslikely to live with a single mother at some point during childhood as children with a mother inthe top quartile (McLanahan 2004). Racial dif-ferences in single motherhood are also strik-ing. More than two-thirds of black children are

born to unmarried mothers compared with lessthan one-quarter ofwhite childrenandbetweentwo-fths and one-half of Hispanic children(Ventura & Bachrach 2000, Kennedy &Bumpass 2007).

Racial differences in family structure cannot be accounted for solely by differences in moth-erseducationalattainment.Figure 2 showsthegap in single motherhood between white andblack mothers and between white and Hispanicmothers by education. At each educational

level, black mothers have a higher rate of sin-gle motherhood than white or Hispanic moth-ers. The racial differences among less educated women are particularly striking: Between 1980and 2000, the single-motherhood rate among women with a high school education or less wasover 30 percentage points higher among black women than among white women. In contrast,Hispanic women without a high school edu-cation had lower rates of single motherhoodthan white women in 2000. Although the pat-

tern of family structure by race and educationis complex, the overall trend is clear: Advan-taged women continue to raise their childrenin the context of marriage, whereas less advan-taged women are increasingly likely to spendsome time as single mothers.

An extensive literature has examined theamount of the rise in income inequality that can be accounted for by the growth infemale-headed families. The results have beenfar from conclusive, with estimates rangingfrom 11% to 41%. Table 1 describes re-cent studies, along with some of their impor-

tant characteristics. All these studies use ei-ther Current Population Survey (CPS) datafrom the March Supplement or decennial Cen-sus data, and most conceptualize family struc-ture as families with an unmarried femalehouseholder versus families with two marriedparents.

Two factors may account for the large vari-ance in the estimates: the time periods exam-ined and the extent to which researchers takeother factors into account in their analyses.The

choice of time period inuences estimates be-cause macroeconomic trends such as recessionsand unemployment affect income inequality. Martin (2006) argues that family structure ex-plains more of the variance in family incomein periods of low inequality growth and less of the variance in periods of high growth. Indeed,several studies nd much larger family struc-ture effects duringthe1970s (Karoly & Burtless1995, Lee 2005, Martin 2006) and 1990s (Lee2005, Daly & Valletta 2006, Martin 2006) as

compared with the 1980s (for an exception, seeChevan & Stokes 2000). The choice of time period may also matter

if the relationship between family structure andincome inequality has changed over time as theresult of changingpatterns of selection into sin-gle motherhood. In addition, a mechanical ef-fect arises whereby studies using two endpointsdisplay more variability compared with studiesaveraging estimates over many years (Martin2006).

The second major source of variability inestimates is related to modeling strategy. Asshown above, family structure is correlated with other factorsparticularly race/ethnicity and educationwhich are known to affect family income. Estimates of family structures

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contributing to a separation of marriage andchildbearing among the latter.

Income Inequality and MarriageIncome inequality may affect marriage in many ways. First, the inequality in mens wages in-

creases the gains to women of searching for thebestpossiblehusband.Asaresult,womenmarry later when wage inequality is high (Becker1981, Oppenheimer 1997). In empirical tests of this hypothesis, Loughran (2002) nds that in-creases in male wage inequality over time in ge-ographically, educationally, and racially denedmarriage markets can account for between 7%and 18% of the decline in marriage between1970 and 1990 for white women, but for con-siderably less of the decline for black women.

Similarly, Gould & Paserman (2003) estimatethat differences in male wage inequality can ac-count for approximately 25% of the decline inmarriage over the past few decades.

Earnings inequality not only increases thebenets of searching, it also makes it harderfor low-income couples to reach the marriagebar, dened as the standard of living a cou-ple is expected to obtain before they marry.Dixon (1978)andOppenheimer (1994)both ar-gue that the marriage bar has oftenbeen higher

than the minimum necessary to establish an in-dependent household. If we assume that themarriage bar is some function of the popula-tions median income(asopposed to anabsolutestandard), then increases in income inequality make it harder for couples at the bottom of theincomedistribution to reach thebar. Moreover,ifwe assumethat the bar is a functionof the me-dian income of married couples, the distancebecomes even greater as marriage becomes in-creasingly concentrated among high-income

couples. Thus, the decline in marriage amonglow-income populations likely has a negativefeedback effect by raising the bar even further.

Empiricalevidencefortheimportanceofthemarriage bar comes from both qualitative andquantitative studies. Edin and colleagues (Edin& Kefalas 2005, Gibson-Davis et al. 2005) in-terviewed a large number of low-income sin-

gle mothers and unmarried parents. Theselow-income parents placed a high value onmarriage but also believed that a married cou-ple must maintain a certain standard of living, which includes a house, a car, and stable em-ployment. In interviews with cohabiting cou-ples from working-class backgrounds, Smock

and colleagues (2005) also nd that couples be-lieve they should wait to marry until they ob-tain nancial stability. In a quantitative analysisof union formation, Clarkberg (1999)nds that men and women who have relatively high levelsof economic well-being compared with peersof similar educational and family backgroundshave twice the probability of marriage, even af-ter controlling for absolute levels of earnings.Similarly, Watson & McLanahan (2004) ndthat the distance between a mans own income

and the median male income in his city affectshis likelihood of getting married if his incomeis below (but not above) the estimated marriagebar, even after adjusting for his own income.

Wage inequality may also make men in thebottom half of the income distribution less at-tractive as marriage partners. Despite the in-crease inwomens employment, themale bread- winner role continues to be an important norm(Sweeney 2002), and men who cannot meet theexpectations associated with this role are likely

to be deemed as failures by society, themselves,and their partners. The most common versionof this argument focuses on the negative con-sequences of job loss for marriage and the ab-solute decline in mens earnings (Wilson 1996,1987). But one can make a similar argument forthe relative decline in mens earnings, if womenuse a relative yardstick to judge the suitability of potential partners.

Several well-known ethnographies havedocumented the corrosive effects of mens

inability to support their families, includingBakkes (1940) study of families in the Great Depression andLiebows (1967)study of street-corner life in the 1960s. Furstenbergs (2007)review of the ethnographic literature ndsa common pattern in these ethnographies, with male unemployment followed by maritalstrain or dissolution and men retreating from


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involvement in family life. Recent ethnogra-phies of family life such as those by Ander-son (1990), Edin & Kefalas (2005), and Waller(2002) also nd male unemployment and un-deremployment to be major obstacles to mar-riage and stable families.

In addition to the ethnographic studies, a

large body of quantitative research has exam-ined the effects of male unemployment andlow earnings on marriage, divorce, and singlemotherhood (see Ellwood & Jencks 2004 andBurstein 2007 for comprehensive reviews of this literature). Included here are studies us-ing area-level data to examine differences inthe prevalence of marriage (or single mother-hood) among women, studies using individual-level data to examine the incidence of mar-riage and divorce among women, and studies

using individual-level data to examine the in-cidence of marriage and divorce among men.Each study faces limitations with respect to itsabilityto identifycausality. Forexample, studiesthat use aggregate-level data cannot determine whether the association between male employ-ment andmarriageresults from marriageaffect-ing employment or vice versa. Similarly, stud-ies that use prospective data on single womenslikelihood of marriage cannot directly measurethe employment characteristics of their poten-

tial partners. Even studies that follow men overtime are limited insofar as mens employment may be an indicator of their intention to marry rather than an employment effect per se. What is most striking about this literature is the con-sistency of the empirical ndings; all the stud-ies show that male unemployment or underem-ployment has a large negative effect on unionformation and stability. Given the consistency of the empirical evidence and the strong the-oretical arguments for a causal effect, we nd

this argument convincing.

Income Inequality and Single Motherhood Above we focus on the reasons why wageinequality might lead to delays in marriage.Delays in marriage, however, do not fully ex-

plain why women from disadvantaged grounds have children in the absence ofriage whereas more advantaged women both marriage and children.

To understand why some women wbe willing to have children in the absenmarriage, we must rst acknowledge th

portance of motherhood for womens idenEdin & Kefalas (2005) argue that althpoor women view marriage as a luxury view motherhood as essential. Moreoverbelieve in their ability to perform theof mother and receive psychological befrom taking care of children. Whereas women in the United States place a high on children, women with high skills acollege education have other possible soof identity from which they can derive mea

and fulllment. Not surprisingly, childlesis much more common among highly edu women and women in professional occupathan among less educated women (Abm Martinez 2006).

Growing inequality in womens earningtential may also have contributed to nontal childbearing among low-skilled womreducing the perceived benets of delmotherhood. Wage inequality among wo(Gottschalk & Danziger 2005) and the re

to education for highly skilled women (HLuker 2005, DiPrete & Buchmann 2006) increased across time and birth cohortscause womens employment and earningsto fall sharply when they become mo(Waldfogel 1997, Budig & England 2those in a position to take advantage of neucational and employment opportunities a strong incentive to invest in education anreers before having children. In contrast, inequality reduces incentives to invest in

cation among women who are not in a poto pursue higher education [i.e., womenhave attended low-quality schools, lack cial means to pursue higher education, androle models (and information more genera

A number of researchers have examinedopportunity costs affect the timing of womchildbearing. This literature is plague


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questions of how to account for unobservedheterogeneity because women who have chil-dren at younger ages are different from women who delay childbearing to older ages. Some re-cent studies have compared women who be-come pregnant at the same age but have differ-ent birth outcomesinvoluntary miscarriage

versus live birthsto try to measure the earn-ings and employment effects of delaying child-bearing. One strain of this research focused onbirthstoteenmothers.Althoughteenagemoth-ers have much lower educational attainments,earnings, and household incomes than moth-ers who delay childbearing, Hoffman (2008)nds that once selection into teenage mother-hood is taken into account, early childbearingdoes not adversely affect a womans own earn-ings, her spouses earnings, or her income from

public assistance. However, a teenage birthdoes reduce educational attainment (Hoffman2008). Hoffmans ndings suggest that women who become teenage mothers may have hadlow opportunity costs in terms of lost earn-ings or wages. Looking at an older age group, Miller (2006) nds that even short delays inmotherhood increase womens cumulativeearly career earnings (from age 21 to 34) by approx-imately 10% per year of delay and that the ef-fect is much stronger for women with college

educations or in professional and managerialoccupations. Most research on the opportunity costs of

early or nonmarital childbearing focuses onthe ways motherhood affects womens wagesor earnings, but fertility behavior may also af-fect a womans economic status by inuencingher chances of marriage and the quality of herspouse. For women, husbands earnings are animportant component of total family income.Several researchers have shown that women

who have had a nonmarital birth are muchless likely than other women to ever marry (Bennett et al. 1995, Upchurch et al. 2001,Graefe & Lichter 2002). Assuming that womentake this information into account in makingdecisions about childbearing, declines in mar-riage (owing to increases in mens earnings in-equality) reduce the opportunity costs of non-

marital childbearing for women who have low expectations of marriage.

Finally, while the opportunity cost of early childbearing was increasing for highly skilled women relative to low-skilled women, otherforces were reducing the direct costs of early childbearing andsingle motherhoodforwomen

from disadvantaged backgrounds. The rst fac-tor was a decline in the stigma associated withsinglemotherhood andsex outside marriage. Ina review ofattitude trends fromthe 1960s to theendof the1990s,Thornton& Young-DeMarco(2001) show that acceptance of premarital sexand cohabitation increased substantially. Addi-tionally, although most people continue to be-lieve that marriage is the best context for child-rearing, fewer say that nonmarital childbearingis immoral.

A second factor was the expansion of wel-fare rights and benets that make it easier fora woman to raise a child alone. Welfare bene-ts increased dramatically during the late1960sand early 1970s. Although cash benets de-clined after 1975, the value of in-kind benets(e.g., food stamps, housing, medical care) con-tinued to rise.

A large number of researchers have at-temptedtoestimatethesizeofthewelfareeffect on familyformation. Thesestudiestypicallyuse

information on changes between (and within)state differences in welfare benets to iden-tify the causal effect of welfare. In a widely re-spected review of this literature, Moftt (1998)reports that, on average, these cross-sectionalanalyses show that welfare decreases marriageand increases nonmarital fertility. However, hepoints out that the estimates vary widely acrossstudies and that the true magnitude of the wel-fare effect is likely to be small. Moreover, henotes that most analyses using time-series data

do not nd a signicant effect, although thisomission can be explained by the failure of analyses to account for changes in wage rates(Moftt 2000). More recent time-series analyses also nd that changes in welfare benetsdo not explain much of the increase in singlemotherhood (Blauet al.2004).However, recent research focusing explicitly on the likelihood of


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futuremarriageamongunwedmothers, a groupfor whom welfare is especially salient, ndslarge negative effects of welfare (Knab et al.2007).

DOES FAMILY STRUCTURECAUSE INEQUALITY?If family structure is a mechanism in the repro-duction of inequalities, as opposed to a markerof disadvantage, it must have a causal impact on the outcomes we care about. This sectionexamines the ways in which family structuredifferences affect class, gender, and racial in-equalities. We rst review the evidence that family structure affects childrens life chancesand intergenerational class mobility. We thenconsider how family structure changes may ex-

acerbate gender and racial inequality. Becausethe issue of causality is central to our argument, we devote considerable space to it.

Childrens Life Chances A large body of research indicates that liv-ing apart from a biological parent (typically the father) is associated with a host of nega-tive outcomes that are expected to affect chil-drens future life chances or ability to moveup the income ladder (McLanahan & Sandefur1994, Sigle-Rushton & McLanahan 2004, Amato 2005).3 Children who grow up apart from their biological fathers score lower onstandardized tests, report poorer grades, and view themselves as having less academic po-tential than children who grow up with bothbiological parents. Most importantly, they arealso more likely to drop out of high school,less likely to attend college, and less likely tograduate from college. Most of these effects aresimilar for boys and girls; for children from dif-ferentsocioeconomic, racial, andethnic groups;and for children living with stepfathers as wellas single mothers.

3 The following discussion of research on family structureand child well-being draws heavily from Sigle-Rushton & McLanahan (2004).

Children who grow up apart from theiological father also experience a higher plenceof behavioralandpsychologicalprobsuch as shynessand aggression, than otherdren. Some studies report that father abshas a more negative effect on boys pslogical well-being than on girls. Howeve

nding may result from an emphasis on agsive behavior, which is more common aboys. Studies that examine anxiety and dsion (orwithdrawal) ndno genderdiffere Although some of the psychological and beior problems associated with divorce and motherhood may be short-lived, if they oat times of crucial transitions (such as ing high school and becoming sexually athey may create disorder in the life courscarries lasting penalties.

Finally, the absence of a father is asso with childrens transition to adulthood, ily formation, and economic status as yadults. Compared with children in two-pafamilies, children who spend time in a smother family are more likely to have an early age, anddaughters from single-mofamilies are more likely to form romanticnerships and begin childbearing at a youage. Children from stepparent families apto be especiallydisadvantaged when it com

early home leaving. Because early homeing and early childbearing may interfereeducational attainment, these transitions aparticular concern. Similarly, early sexual rience is a concern if it leads to early chiling or home leaving. Early partnerships tebe less stable and more likely to dissolvrelationships formed later in life. Comp with children raised by single parents, chraised by both biological parents have hearnings, are less likely to be live in po

and are in a better position to insure themseagainst economic uncertainties. The above review concentrates on th

fects of biological father absence, a charistic of most new family structures. Howunmarried, cohabiting biological parent flies are also becoming more common. Dodren from families with two stably cohab


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unmarried parents fare as well as children frommarried parent families? The evidence so farsuggests they do not (Brown 2004, Artis 2007),although the research on this topic is limited.One reason for the difference between thesechildren is that cohabiting parent families havemuch higherdissolution rates than married par-

ent families, so most children born to cohabit-ing parents experience father absence at somepoint in their lives (Kennedy & Bumpass 2007,Osborne & McLanahan 2007).

Selection Bias The effects described above are mainly fromobservational studies, which provide limitedinformation because the children in these stud-ies are not randomly distributed across family

structures, unlike in an experimental study that randomly assigns people to one group oranother. Thus, we cannot be sure that the out-comes associated with divorce andsingle moth-erhood actually result from family structureper se as opposed to another factor that is morecommonamong people who divorceor becomesingle mothers. For example, parents inter-personal skills likely affect both their family structure and their parenting skills.Children of parents with poor interpersonal skills who

experience a lower quality of parenting likely have worse outcomes than other children,regardless of whether they live with both par-ents. Thus, if we do not account for selectioninto family structure, we may overestimate thecausal effects.

To deal with possible selection bias, re-searchers have used various statistical tech-niques and natural experiments. One such ap-proach compares children who share parents(or one parent) but experience different fam-

ily structures or different lengths of expo-sure to a particular family structure (Ermisch& Francesconi 2001, Wolnger et al. 2003,Bjorklund et al. 2007). For example, if parentsseparate when one child is 10 and the otherchild is 5, the older sibling experienced 8 yearsof father absence before his eighteenth birth-day, whereas the other sibling experienced 13

years of father absence. This approach assumesthat the longer a child lives in a father-absent family, the greater is the negative effect. If thisassumption is true, the sibling with the longerexposure should have worse outcomes than thesibling with the shorter exposure to father ab-sence. Other researchers have used a similar

strategy to examine the effects of living in astepparent family (Case et al. 2001, Hofferth & Anderson 2003, Evenhouse & Reilly 2004,Ginther & Pollak 2004, Gennetian 2005). Inthese studies, one child has typically experi-enced a divorce, and the second child (half-sibling) has lived with both biological parentssince birth. Few sibling studies compare un-married two-parent families with married two-parent families, making it difcult to determine whether parental cohabitation is equivalent to

marriage in its effects on child outcomes.In general, the ndings from the siblingstudies are quite mixed. In some cases, the dif-ferences between children across the variousfamily structures become smaller and insignif-icant when siblings are compared (Hofferth& Anderson 2003, Ginther & Pollak 2004,Gennetian 2005, Bjorklund et al. 2007). Inother cases, the differences become larger orremain signicant (Case et al. 2001, Ermisch &Francesconi 2001, Evenhouse & Reilly 2004).

It is important to keep in mind that estimat-ing family structure effects from sibling mod-els changes the interpretation of the ndingsenormously. Blended families area selectgroup,and what happens in these families may not bereective of the whole population. Moreover,sibling models assume that parents treat theirchildren exactly the same and that childrenrespond similarly to family structure changes, which is unlikely.4 For example, parents may wait to divorce until the oldest child leaves

home (or is older) precisely because they believe this child would be harmed morethan the younger child by the divorce. Thus,

4However, Wolnger and colleagues (2003) test differencesin the effects of divorce within sibling pairs and nd that divorce affects child outcomes similarly for children in thesame family.


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nding no difference between siblings in such afamily does not necessarily mean that the oldersibling would not have been harmed by an ear-lier divorce.

A second strategy for determining the ef-fect of parental absence on children is to usea so-called natural experiment to determine

whether children exposed to father absence by a force clearly beyond their parents controlhave worse outcomes than children who arenot exposed. For example, Gruber (2004) and Johnson & Mazingo (2000) have examined theassociationbetweenyears of exposure to unilat-eral or no-fault divorce laws in childhood and arange of adult outcomes, including marital sta-tus, fertility, educational attainment, and earn-ings. Gruber nds that living in a state withunilateral laws is associated with less education,

more dropping out of high school, more early marriage, and more divorce. In some instances,the effects differ for women and men, but inall cases at least one group experiences a neg-ative outcome. Although unilateral divorce issignicantly associated with poorer outcomesin children, this strategy is limited in its ca-pability to provide an estimate of the causaleffect of divorce. The authors of both papersargue that changes in divorce law may have al-tered the bargaining power of husbands and

wives in ways that disadvantage their children.If this were true, the negative outcomes asso-ciated with these changes may not result fromincreases in divorce but rather from changesaffecting parental obligations toward childrenmore generally. In sum, state-level variation indivorce laws does not provide an acceptableinstrumental variable for child outcomes andlikely overestimates the relationship betweenfamily structure and child outcomes.

Another natural experiment involves

parental death. Because death is more likely than divorce or nonmarital parenthood to bea random event, the effect of parental deathshould provide a less biased estimate of theeffect of father absence. In several reviewsof the literature, Amato and his colleagues(1991a,b) report that, compared with childrenin intact families, adolescents in bereaved

families score signicantly lower on acaachievement tests, and males are less to nish high school. Biblarz & Gottai(2000) ndings also show that childrenexperience parental death are less likenish high school than children withmarried parents. Children exposed to a pa

death also have more behavioral problemlower psychological adjustment than chiin two-parent families. Parental death typhas a smaller (less negative) effect on chthan parental divorce, consistent with the ament that at least some of the effect of group with a single parent results from seleHowever, there are other reasons why parabsence resulting from death may affectdren differently than absence resulting divorce or nonmarital childbearing. Chil

from divorced and unmarried families have less access to the absent parents capital and less interaction with the parfamily and friends, whereas death maythe opposite effect, actually increasing sufrom friends and kin. Divorce and nonmparenthood are also often accompanieresidential instability, whereas parental less frequently necessitates a move. Mormost children who do not live with parents still have some contact with the a

parent, but children who experience pardeath obviously do not. Thus, using pardeath is far from a perfect way of measselection effects.

In sum, selection appears to accounsome but not all of the difference in childcomes associated with divorce and fathesence. Parents that divorce or never marrdifferent from parents that remain conously married, and studies that do not accfor pre-existing differences are bound to

state the negative effect of family stru Moreover, although longitudinal data allosearchers to account for observed differprior to family formationanddisruption, sustrategyis limited in that it cannotadjust foferences that arenotobserved by the researor are not easily measured in large-scalecollection. Attempts to control for unobse


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differences, either by exploiting new mea-sures or employing new statistical techniques,frequently reduce the association between fa-ther absence and poor child outcomes. How-ever, all these methods have their own lim-itations and, in general, do not account forall the differences in children, families, and

subsequent outcomes. The negative impact of parental death on childrens outcomes is prob-ably the strongest evidence we have to datethat fatherabsence reduces child well-being, al-though this conclusion is tempered by the fact that children with coresident cohabiting fathersare often as disadvantaged as children in single-mother families.

Pathways Another way to address the selection issue isto develop and test hypotheses about the spe-cic pathways that are expected to link family structure to child outcomes. Although such anapproach does not rule out the possibility that selection is operating at each turn in the pathway, it is more conservative than just lookingat the correlation between family structure andchild outcomes insomuch as each pathway canbe subjected to its own empirical test.Figure 3illustrates the major pathways through whichfamily structure is expected to affect childrens well-being.

According to Figure 3 , some family struc-tures underminechildrens future success by re-ducing family resources, such as income andmothers mental health, which in turn reducethe quality of parenting and resources availableto them, ultimately decreasing their well-being.Figure 3 is a simplied model illustrating how family structure may affect child outcomes andis not meant to be exhaustive; rather, it re-

ects the most studied and important pathwaysthrough which family structure maybe causally inuencing child outcomes.

Family structure and parental resources. Women who divorce or have children outsidemarriage are likely to be economically disadvantaged even before they become single moth-ers. At the same time, single motherhood is ex-pected to reduce family income because thereis one less potential earner in the householdand because womens hourly earnings are lessthan those of men. In their lengthy review of the literature on the economic consequences of divorce,Holden& Smock(1991)report that divorce is associated with a 30% reduction in theincome of mothers and children. More recent estimates show that the loss in womens incomefollowinga divorcemayhave lessened over timebecause of increases in womens employment and earnings but that there is still a substantialloss (Smocket al.1999, McKeever & Wolnger2001),althoughBedard& Deschenes(2005)ar-gue there is no effect once selection is takeninto account. Women in cohabiting relation-shipsexperiencea33%53%decreaseinhouse-hold income following their union dissolution(Avellar & Smock 2005). More recently, re-searchers have looked at the economic conse-quences of nonmarriage for women who givebirth outside marriage.These studies show that unmarried mothers poverty rates would belower if theyweremarriedto the fathers of theirchildren, although not nearly as low as moth-ers whose children were born within marriage(Sigle-Rushton & McLanahan 2002, Thomas& Sawhill 2005).

Divorce and single parenthood may affect mental health by causing short-term stress and

Familystructure Child outcomes

Parentalresources Parenting

Figure 3Simplied pathway between family structure and child outcomes.


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creating conditions that foster ongoing stressand strain. Using xed-effects models, Musick & Bumpass (2007) nd that union formationbeginning a marriage or cohabitationis asso-ciated with a short-term increase in happinessand decrease in depression. Simon (2002) alsonds that marriage decreases never-married

womens depression, whereas divorce increases womens depression. Meadows and her col-leagues (2008) also nd evidence of short-term negative effects associated with divorceand relationship instability, which is incon-sistent with a selection argument. Althoughsome researchers argue that the effects of divorce are likely to fade over time (Hetheringtonet al. 1985), many divorced and never-marriedmothers experience multiple transitions, whichexpose mothers and children to multiple

short-term stressors (Fomby & Cherlin 2007,Osborne & McLanahan 2007).

Parentingand childwell-being. Alargebody of theory and empirical research indicates that parents play a critical role in their childrenscognitive and emotional development. Parentsprovide nurturance, and discipline; they pro-mote language development and act as teach-ers; and they are responsible for monitor-ing and managing the care the child receives

from other adults (Maccoby & Martin 1983,Bornstein 2002). The most widely used assess-ment of parenting quality is the HOME in- ventory (Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment), which measures multi-ple parenting domains and is based on a com-bination of parental reports and direct observation of parent-child interactions (Bradley &Caldwell 1984). Much of the literature on par-enting, similar to the literature on divorce andsingle parenthood, is based on observational

data rather than experiments and therefore issubject to criticisms of selection bias. Fortu-nately, researchers can randomly assign par-ents to programs that teach parenting skillsand observe whether increases in skills are as-sociated with improvements in child behavior. The literature on these interventions indicatesthat improvements in parenting do lead to im-

provementsinchildoutcomes(Brooks-Gun Markman 2005). There is also evidence thaterventions designed to improve parentinglowing a divorce can reduce behavior proamong adolescents (Wolchik et al. 2002).

Resources, parenting, and child well-being

Good parenting, which results in positive outcomes, depends on parental resourcesas family income and parents mental hLow income and nancial insecurity rethe quality of the childs physical surrounand the services that can be purchasedside the home, such as child care and mcare. It also affects parent-child relationby increasing parental stress. A large nuof studies have documented the correlatiotween family income and childrens well-b

although again there is debate over whthe effect of income is causal (DuncBrooks-Gunn 1997, Mayer 1997). The mconvincing evidence that incomehas a causfect comes from evaluations of several larcialexperiments,includingwelfare experimcarried out in Canada and the United Statthe1990s.These studies found that increasmothersearningsandfamilyincomewereciated with gains in childrens achievemenhealth (Huston et al. 2001, Morris et al. 2

Although these evaluations show that famicome led to improvements in child outcothey cannot distinguish between pure inceffects and employment effects becauseof the mothers in these studies were reqor encouraged to increase their employmlevels.

Mothers mental health is another crfactor in determining the quality of parcare insofar as mothers health affects theity of her parenting. Meta-analyses ind

that maternal depression is associated lower levels of nurturance andparental engment and with higher levels of harsh paing (Downey & Coyne 1990, Lovejoy 2000). Differences in parenting appear more pronounced among mothers of inthan among mothers with older children, gesting that the differences are not drive


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differences in childrens personalities or be-haviors. Differences are also more pronouncedamong low-income mothers as compared withafuent mothers. As was the case with the re-search on income, this evidence is based pri-marily on observational data. However, someresearchers have examined the effectiveness of

interventions designed to improve parentingamong mothers with mood disorders usingexperimental design and random assignment. These studies indicate that improvements inmothers mental health lead to better parent-child interaction (Beardslee et al. 2003).

Above we argue that family structure affectschildrens educational attainment, earningsand employment, and family formation. Theseoutcomes affect childrens class status and eco-nomic well-being as adults. Because the family

structures that negatively affect child develop-ment aremost commonamong low-income andless educated Americans, we can think of fam-ily structure as a mechanism by which class in-equality is reproduced. Below we discuss how family structure may affect racial and genderinequalities as well.

Reproducing Racial InequalitiesFamily structure changes may affect racial in-

equality if the distribution of children acrossfamily structures varies by race or if family structure effects vary across racial groups. Inthis section, we discuss the evidence for each of these mechanisms.

As argued above, family structure causally affects childrens outcomes such that childrenraised in an intact two-parent family are morelikely to be economically successful andachieveupward mobility than children raised by sin-gle parents or stepparents. If more children in

some racial groups have the benets of grow-ing up with both parents than in other groups, agapshouldemerge (orwiden)in social-mobility rates. As discussed above, racial differences infamily structure are large. A much higher per-centage of black and Hispanic children than white children live apart from their fathers dur-ing their childhood: 44% of black children and

20% of Hispanic children start life living apart from their fathers compared with 10% of non-Hispanic white children. Of children born tomarried or cohabiting parents, black and His-panic children are also much more likely to ex-perience parental separation during childhood(Kennedy & Bumpass 2007). Even if the causal

effects of family structure are small, the sizabledifference in family structure distribution sug-gests that family structure may become an im-portant mechanism in maintaining and exacer-bating racial economic inequality.

Some scholars have suggested that the ef-fects of family structure may vary by race. They argue that racial and ethnic groups in whichtwo-parent families are less common may havedeveloped different models of childrearing andsocial support, which rely less on the nuclear

family and more on extended-kin networks. If family structure has a different effect on well-being for children of different racial groups,then differences in the distribution of family structures across racial groups may not lead toincreased racial inequalities. The evidence todate is far from conclusive. On the one hand,there is some evidence of weaker effects forblackchildren (see Fomby & Cherlin 2007).Onthe other hand, there is evidence of strongereffects for children of less educated mothers

(Cooper et al. 2007). Moreover, even if dif-ferent childrearing practices alleviate some of the negative effects of father absence, differ-ences in material resources by family structure would remain. Indeed, studies of the correla-tion between family structure and poverty ratesshow that changes in family structure account for a larger share of the change in child poverty among non-Hispanic blacks than among His-panics or non-Hispanic whites (Iceland 2003)and that the poverty rates of black and Puerto

Rican children would be 35% lower if theirdis-tributionacross familystructures were thesameas in the total population of children (Lichteret al. 2005).5 Thus, it is unlikely that the effects

5However, Manning & Brown (2006) nd that living withmarried parents versus cohabiting parents is associated with


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of family disruption on disadvantaged popula-tions are small enough to make them inconse-quential.

Reproducing Gender InequalitiesDespite considerable changes in family struc-

ture since 1960, the share of single parents who are men has remained virtually unchanged.Changes in family structure may contributeto the reproduction of gender inequalities intwo ways. First, parenthood affects the em-ployment and earnings of women much morestrongly than it does men because womenbear the primary responsibility for raising chil-dren. Second, when parents live apart, womenbear a disproportionate share of the costs of children. Therefore, single mothers shoulder

more caretaking responsibilities, and nonresi-dent fathers lose out on the joys of family lifeand other benets that accompany fatherhood.Below we discuss these mechanisms in moredetail.

Before becoming parents, most women earnless money than their male partners, and afterthe transition to parenthood, the difference inearnings increases. Recent research shows that men experience gains in wage rates after thebirth of a rst child, whereas women, on aver-

age, experience losses (Lundberg& Rose 2000). Women experience earnings losses becausethey take time off work to care for childrenand are penalized for this in the labor market (Waldfogel 1997, Lundberg & Rose 2000).Correll and colleagues (Ridgeway & Correll2004, Correll et al. 2007) cite employment dis-crimination against mothers as a possible addi-tional source of disadvantage. In contrast, theevidence suggests that men either benet orexperience no change in employer treatment

based on their parental status (Correll et al.2007). When parents live in the same house-hold, these changes in earnings and employ-ment may offset each other. However, when

greater economic resources for white children than for black or Hispanic children.

they live in different households, womenany potential benets from this type ofcialization. Single mothers who are not ried tend to work more than married mers (Cohen & Bianchi 1999), but this incrlevel of maternal employment does notcompensate for the loss of a male par

income. A long line of research showone reason why womens poverty ratemuch higher than mens rates is because women face the high costs of raisingdren without adequate nancial support the childs father (Garnkel & McLan1986). Additionally, recent research show women and men who grow up in miincomeor afuent families have similar chof intergenerational mobility, whereas wo who grow up in the bottom fth of th

come distribution are much less likely to ea similar economic status as adults thanmale counterparts (Isaacs 2007). This sugthat the economic status and chances forbility for women are lower than for men ibecause of womens greater responsibilichildren.

Caretaking responsibilities for childrendiffer by family structure. Fathers spentime with their children if they do not livethem, leaving mothers in single-mother f

lies with more responsibility. This uneventribution has two effects. First, single mohave less time available for work or leisumore stress in coordinating and providingfor their children. Second, nonresident famiss out on the benets of living with chi Akerlof (1998) argues that men withoutdren aremore likely to engagein risky beha work less, and have lower incomes.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION This article addresses whether family strucan be viewed as a mechanism in the reprtion of inequality. For this statement to berect, family structure must be a consequenincome inequality, and it also must be a of future inequality. We argue that both ory and empirical evidence suggest that


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conditions hold. With respect to the rst con-dition, income inequality undermines marriageand union stability by reducing the propor-tion of men in the population who are deemedsuitable for marriage, by making it harder forcouples to achieve the standard of living they associate with marriage, and by reducing low-

skilledwomens motivation to delayhaving chil-dren until after they marry. With respect tothe second condition, single motherhood low-ers childrens future life chances by reducingparental resources (income and mental health)and undermining the quality of parenting. Be-

causechildrenfromthelowerendoftheincomedistributionare much more likely to experiencefatherabsence than other children, andbecausethe negative effects of father absence appear tobe just as detrimental for these children as they are for children from advantaged backgrounds,the evidence suggests that recent changes in

the family are contributing to the intergener-ational persistence of inequality. Finally, we ar-gue that changes in family structure are alsocontributing to increases in disparities between whites and minorities and between women andmen.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT The authors are not aware of any biases that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this

review.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors acknowledge support from NICHD grant R01HD36916.

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www.annualreviews.org Family Structure and Inequality C-1

Figure 1 Trends in single motherhood and income inequality in the United States, 19602000. The single-motherhood trend is calculated asthe percentage of mothers who are not married and who are living with their children. The nonmarital birth trend is calculated as

the percentage of mothers who are not married and who have a child less than 1 year old. The Gini coefficient is for all families,including those without children. Single motherhood and nonmarital births are based on authors tabulation of 1960, 1970, 1980,1990, and 2000 IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) Census data. Gini coefficients are from Historical Income Tables,U.S. Bureau of the Census ( http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/f04.html ).

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C-2C-2 McLanahan Percheski

Figure 2Differences in single motherhood by race and education based on tabulations of 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 IPUMS Censusdata.

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Annual Review of Sociology

Volume 34, 2008Contents

Prefatory Chapters

Reproductive Biology, Technology, and Gender Inequality: An Autobiographical Essay Joan N. Huber 1

From Mead to a Structural Symbolic Interactionism and BeyondSheldon Stryker 15

Theory and Methods

Methodological Memes and Mores: Toward a Sociology of Social Research Erin Leahey 33

Social Processes

After Secularization? Philip S. Gorski and Ate s Altnordu 55

Institutions and CultureReligion and Science: Beyond the Epistemological Conict Narrative

John H. Evans and Michael S. Evans 87

Black/White Differences in School Performance: The OppositionalCulture ExplanationDouglas B. Downey 107

Formal Organizations

Sieve, Incubator, Temple, Hub: Empirical and Theoretical Advances

in the Sociology of Higher Education Mitchell L. Stevens, Elizabeth A. Armstrong, and Richard Arum 127

Political and Economic Sociology

Citizenship and Immigration: Multiculturalism, Assimilation,and Challenges to the Nation-State Irene Bloemraad, Anna Korteweg, and G okce Yurdakul 153

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Differentiation and Stratication

The Sociology of Discrimination: Racial Discriminationin Employment, Housing, Credit, and Consumer MarketsDevah Pager and Hana Shepherd

The Second Generation in Western Europe:Education, Unemployment, and Occupational Attainment Anthony F. Heath, Catherine Rothon, and Elina Kilpi

Broken Down by Race and Gender? Sociological Explanationsof New Sources of Earnings Inequality Kevin T. Leicht

Family Structure and the Reproduction of InequalitiesSara McLanahan and Christine Percheski

Unconscious Racism: A Concept in Pursuit of a Measure Hart Blanton and James Jaccard

Individual and Society Horizontal Stratication in Postsecondary Education:

Forms, Explanations, and ImplicationsTheodore P. Gerber and Sin Yi Cheung

Gender Inequalities in EducationClaudia Buchmann, Thomas A. DiPrete, and Anne McDaniel

Access to Civil Justice and Race, Class, and Gender Inequality Rebecca L. Sandefur

How the Outside Gets In: Modeling Conversational PermeationDavid R. Gibson

Testing and Social Stratication in American Education Eric Grodsky, John Robert Warren, and Erika Felts

Policy

Social Networks and Health Kirsten P. Smith and Nicholas A. Christakis

Sociology and World Regions

Gender in African Population Research: The Fertility/ReproductiveHealth Example F. Nii-Amoo Dodoo and Ashley E. Frost

Regional Institutions and Social Development in Southern Africa Matthew McKeever

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Conditional Cash Transfers as Social Policy in Latin America: An Assessment of their Contributions and Limitations [Translation] Enrique Valencia Lomel 475

Las Transferencias Monetarias Condicionadas como Poltica Social en Amrica Latina. Un Balance: Aportes, Lmites y Debates[Original, available online at http://www.annualreviews.org/

go/EValenciaLomeli] Enrique Valencia Lomel 499

Indexes

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 2534 525

Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 2534 529

Errata

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Sociology articles may be found at http://soc.annualreviews.org/errata.shtml

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Documents

Mc Lanahan..Family Structure and the Reproduction of Inequalites