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 […]

Phase II of the CYFAR Project, Beginning Education Early: Strengthening Rural Alabama Families (BEE), is being implemented in three Alabama counties through the Alabama Extension System county offices. The goals for Phase II of the BEE project are to increase parental capacity to (1) initiate contact and interact productively with community services related to children’s […]

Using data from the 2002 National Survey of America’s Families, the authors find that the majority of the gaps in poverty, low-income status, and food insecurity between children living in cohabiting and married couple families is accounted for by differences in characteristics such as parental education, age, and the number of hours worked. The benefits […]

Much of the debate over welfare reauthorization centers on whether marriage promotion should play a key role. Few studies, however, have tracked the marriage and divorce histories of unwed mothers, including minority women, who are often the main targets of welfare reform. Data from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth were used to estimate […]