This webcast focused on efforts to build healthy relationships and sustain healthy marriages through marriage education. Panelists included: Bill Coffin, Special Assistant for Marriage Education, Administration for Families and Children, HHS; Francesca Adler-Baeder, Auburn University, Alabama; Dana Reichert, TANF Director for the state of Louisiana; and Carlis Williams, Regional Administrator, Administration for Children and Families, […]

Has the relationship between economic prospects and marriage formation in the United States changed in recent decades? To answer this question, a discrete-time event-history ananlysis was conducted using data from multiple cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience. Among women, results indicate growth in the importance of earnings for marriage formation between […]

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 […]

The institution that most strongly protects mothers and children from domestic abuse and violent crime is marriage. Analysis of ten years worth of findings from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has conducted since 1973, demonstrates that mothers who are or ever have been married are far less […]

This report presents a conceptual framework for interventions that would address the needs and circumstances of unmarried parents and provide relationship skills instruction and knowledge for those who would chose to form and sustain healthy marriages. It builds on research indicating that the period around the time of a child’s birth may represent a critical […]