This article examines the impact of the recent dramatic changes in the social policies, particularly the expansion of the EITC and welfare reform on labor supply, marriage, and cohabitation. Altered policies have increased incentives to work or marry for some, diminished incentives for others. The results strongly indicate expanded work by single mothers and reductions […]

Conservatives have decidedthat what ails America is that not enough of us aregetting and staying married. They have a point. Not only arefewer people marrying than in the past but, more disturbingly,one out of every three children is born outside of marriage.The life chances of these children are seriously compromised.Far more of them will grow […]

This document offers a brief examination of the key policy issues surrounding the EITC and marriage penalties. The EITC is designed to support low income working families with children. It provides a subsidy (up to $3,816 in 1999) for families with children and low earnings. Current research shows that the EITC has been successful in […]

Presentation prepared for the Ohio State University Family Life E-Seminar on Relationship and Marital Enrichment Education (April 2006). The goals of this module are threefold: to explain the impact of couple functioning on individual, family and community well being; articulate the rationale for addressing couple relationships in family life education; and describe appropriate goals and […]

This research tracks parents’ marital outcomes for eight years after their first child’s birth, with a primary focus on parents whose first child was born outside of marriage. Data come from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Though much has changed since the 1980s, when many of the respondents had their first child, the […]

In our efforts to expand the Healthy Couples, Healthy Children project in PY 2004-2005, we incorporated the delivery of relationship skills education at an earlier point of intervention: targeting youth. Although this is a target population of interest in the federal marriage initiative, there has been virtually no work to document program impact and establish […]

In this paper, we use qualitative interview data from the Time, Love, and Cash Among Couples with Children (TLC3) study to investigate couple relationship quality among unmarried couples who have recently had a child together. We find that there are high levels of distrust on issues of fidelity. This sexual distrust leads to less secure […]

In January of 2003, the U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services funded the “”Family Connections in Alabama”” (FCA) project as a 12-month “”Special Improvement Project”” (SIP) to pilot marriage education for low-resource parents and to promote family and relationship strength. The Alabama Children’s […]

Many policymakers ask whether we can foster marital quality and stability, by encouraging people to commit to an orderly life and higher purpose. In political arenas, legislators are now asking whether “”a vow of marriage”” or a “”vow of Godliness”” can cultivatecommitment between partners and better child-rearing for parents. Academics refined theselarger philosophical and social […]