Something you may realize already is that strong, healthy, long-lasting marriages don’t just happen on their own. They happen when two people are intentional about their marriage. That means each person makes an effort to build strong bonds with his or her spouse and work together so that each feels valued, supported, and connected. A […]
ANA seeks to support projects that include approaches to improve child well-being by removing barriers to form and sustain healthy marriages and strengthen families in Native communities. Studies have shown a clear link between healthy marriages and child well-being. A component of the Administration for Children and Families Healthy Marriage Initiative, the Native American Healthy […]
Using a representative sample of children born to unwed parents drawn from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, this study investigates whether marriage after childbirth has a causal effect on early child cognitive ability, using a treatment outcome approach to account for the selection into marriage. Comparing children with similar background characteristics and parental […]
This brochure provides a brief description of the Native American Healthy Marriage Initiative (NAHMI) including goals, targeted strategy, funding opportunities, and training and technical assistance resources. It also includes some statistical data on Native communities and reasons as to why marriage matters.
This study explored how mental illness shapes transitions to marriage among unwed mothers using augmented data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study. We estimated proportional hazard models to assess the effects of mental illness on the likelihood of marriage over a five year period following a non-marital birth. History of diagnosed mental illness […]
There remains a serious structural disincentive to marry for many poor Americans. The U.S. tax and transfer (welfare) systems frequently impose substantial financial penalties on low-income couples who choose to marry. In relative terms, these marriage penalties tend to be much greater than those experienced by non-poor couples, and in some cases amount to family […]
This brief is based on analyses of data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study that examined how current and past participation in the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program affect the likelihood and timing of marriage among mothers who had a nonmarital birth in urban areas during the late 1990s — a […]
African American boys tend to receive more support and have better outcomes-including greater self-esteem and reduced likelihood of delinquency-when they live with married parents.
Family instability is often offered as an explanation for the possible disadvantages faced by children with cohabiting parents. However, measures of family stability typically have focused on changes in legal marital status to the exclusion of cohabitation status. Consequently, children’s experiences of family instability have been underrepresented (Raley and Wildsmith 2004). To better understand a […]
What do the half-century decline in U.S. marriage and the attendant rise in single parenthood mean for the economic well-being of children, especially children living in single-parent families? Adam Thomas and Isabel Sawhill show how differing living arrangements can be expected to affect families’ economic well-being. Married-parent and cohabiting households, for example, can benefit from […]