King’s Dream Deferred for Children of Unmarried Parents

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Last week, news at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School mentioned work by researchers at Princeton and Columbia Universities, which suggests that Martin Luther King’s dream is deferred for millions of children. The reason? A significant increase over the past 40 years in the percentage of children born into fragile families, defined as couples who are unmarried when their children are born. Almost three-fourths of African American children and just over half of Hispanic children are born to unmarried parents, and whites are quickly catching up — so much so that the proportion of white children born to unmarried parents today (29%) is actually higher than it was for blacks in the mid-1960’s when Daniel Moynihan released his report on the black family that voiced concern about this issue.

Research shows that children growing up in fragile families face greater risks to their well-being and future opportunities than children growing up in more traditional families. Simply put, family formation and the associated resources or lack thereof, are creating a new divide among children.

“The evidence suggests that parents’ marital status at the time of their child’s birth is a good predictor of longer-term family stability and complexity, both of which influence children’s wellbeing,” said Sara McLanahan, one of the most authoritative voices on this subject and one of the principal investigators of a seminal study focused on these families. “But as the number of children born to unmarried parents has increased, so has their exposure to poverty and family instability.”

According to the groundbreaking Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study:

  • Unmarried parents are much more disadvantaged than married parents. Unmarried parents are more likely to have started parenting in their teens; are more likely to be poor; are more likely to suffer from depression; and are disproportionately African American or Hispanic. One particular finding is especially jarring – nearly 40% of fathers who have children outside of marriage have been incarcerated at some point in their lifetime, and this number is likely an undercount.
  • A large proportion of unmarried parents are in “marriage-like” relationships at the time of their child’s birth. One-half of unmarried parents are living together at the time of their child’s birth, and another 32% are in ‘visiting unions,’ defined as romantically involved but living apart. This is contrary to the image we have of the “single mother,” giving birth outside of marriage alone with no father by her side.
  • Relationships are unstable. Despite their clearly stated high hopes that they will marry eventually, most unmarried parents do not stay together. The result is that many children experience high levels of instability and complexity. Only 35% of unmarried couples are still living together five years after the birth of their child; given the young age of these parents, those who do not stay together go on to re-partner, exposing their children to increasing numbers of short-term parent figures and half-siblings.
  • Children are doing poorly. Children born to unmarried parents do not fare as well as children born to married parents; single mothers and mothers in unstable partnerships engage in harsher parenting practices and fewer literacy activities with their children than stably married mothers.

“What this suggests,” says McLanahan, “is that we must start to think very seriously about policy reforms that will reverse this trend. If these cohabiting couples were long-term, stable relationships as they are in Scandinavian countries, for example, we would not be concerned. But in the United States they are fragile, and children are suffering as a consequence.”

As Dr. King said, “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.” While the country has made critical gains in this area, it is incumbent upon us to ensure that these gains are not lost on our children.

A fact sheet of the findings can be found at:

http:/www.fragilefamilies.princeton.edu/documents/FragileFamiliesandChildWellbeingStudyFactSheet.pdf

Additional findings are highlighted in The Future of Childen’s volume on Fragile Families.

The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study has been following approximately 5,000 children born in large U.S. cities between 1998 and 2000, including a large oversample of children born to unmarried parents. The Study is a joint effort on Princeton University’s Center for Research on Child Wellbeing and Center for Health and Wellbeing and Columbia University’s Columbia Population Research Center and The National Center for Children and Families. The Study is funded through grants from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD), and a consortium of private foundations and other government agencies.

Students Know: Quality Teachers Make a Difference

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Last week the papers were filled with news about America’s plummeting education system. Shanghai took top PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) awards in math, science, and reading. The United States came in 31st in math, 23rd in science, and 17th in reading.

While the PISA tests raised alarms, the revelation that America’s schools are failing many of our students is no surprise.

In 2007, The Future of Children’s Excellence in the Classroom issue evaluated K-12 education in the United States and recommended policies for reform. Research on teacher quality showed not only that students who have good teachers learn more, but that their learning is cumulative if they have good teachers for several consecutive years. A child in poverty who has a good teacher for five years in a row could have learning gains large enough, on average, to completely close the achievement gap with higher income students.

According to a December 10, 2010 New York Times article, What Works in the Classroom? Ask the Students, students themselves identified which teachers were most effective. Based on preliminary research from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, researchers found that there was substantial agreement between students’ ratings of teachers and teachers’ value-added scores.

Students know quality teaching when they experience it.

As No Child Left Behind comes up for re-authorization in 2011, it is critical that we advocate and engage students, as well as teachers, policy makers, and community members, in conversations and initiatives that will improve education in the United States.

For more information on the Future of Children’s recommendations for education policy, go to our volumes on America’s High Schools and Excellence in the Classroom.

The Gates Foundation provided support for the Future of Children’s journal on Fragile Families, and will provide funding for our upcoming journals on Immigrant Children, Work and Family, and Post Secondary Education in the United States, all of which devote significant attention to education policy and practice.

Who Needs Marriage? Children Do

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As reported in Time Magazine’s November 18th cover story, according to a new Pew Research Center nationwide survey, a growing number of Americans believe that “marriage, whatever its social, spiritual, or symbolic appeal, is in purely practical terms just not as necessary as it used to be.”

The claim raises the question, “not necessary for whom?”

The Future of Children‘s Fragile Families study, referenced in Time’s feature, Who Needs Marriage?, suggests that for some, and particularly for children, marriage is more necessary than ever.

And despite the more general findings that Americans believe that marriage is unnecessary for a host of issues, when it comes to raising kids, more than three-quarters say it’s best done married.

As The Future of Children: Fragile Families journal explains, fragile families – defined as couples who are unmarried when their children are born – face greater risks than more traditional families, which can have negative consequences on child wellbeing. Simply put, stable, two parent homes have greater monetary and emotional resources to support their children’s development. And in the United States, marriage has the greatest chance of achieving relationship stability which leads to stability for children.

So where do we go from here?

The Future of Children Fragile Families journal shows that, contrary to popular belief, most unwed parents have close and loving relationships at the time of their child’s birth. However, at five years after birth only 35 percent of unwed parents are still together. These first moments in a child’s life present a unique opportunity to work with couples to strengthen unwed parents’ relationship and parenting skills.

At the Brookings Institution Fragile Families launch on October 27, 2010, a young man summarized the impact of such program participation on his views about children and marriage.

“When we went to this class, and I listened to the statistics about the married couples and the unmarried couples and how much it would benefit my child for us to be married, I took advantage of that. I want my child to be raised to be a man, and I love my girlfriend. It was a no-brainer, but it really took learning about my child’s future to help me put it together.”

While a growing number of Americans may view marriage as a dying institution, its benefits for children are clear. As our nation’s poverty rate continues to climb, preventing and strengthening fragile families will become increasingly important.

For more information on fragile families and our policy recommendations to support them, please go to The Future of Children’s full volume on Fragile Families.

New Study Confirms Research from Future of Children’s Issue on Children and Electronic Media: Videos for Infants Have Little Educational Impact

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A new study published in Psychological Science confirms research cited in The Future of Children’s Children and Electronic Media issue, which suggests that educational videos for infants have little effect on learning.

In the recent study, led by Judy S. DeLoache of the University of Virginia, results demonstrated that children who viewed a best-selling infant-learning DVD, whether with their parents or without, did not learn any more words from their month-long exposure than did the control group. In fact, the highest level of learning occurred in the no-video condition in which parents tried to teach their children the same target words from the DVD during everyday activities.

These findings confirm previous research, which indicates that children under the age of eighteen months learn better from real-life experiences than from video. This is in part due to children’s inability to understand television. Research studying eye patterns and attention to television shows that young children may be inattentive to dialogue and fail to integrate comprehension across successive scenes. Infants cannot imitate behaviors seen in video or transfer images learned from video to real-world problems, such as object-retrieval.

While more research is needed on infants and media, current research recommends basic methods to increase your infant’s learning: talk to and interact with your baby.

For more information on the relationship between media and children of all ages, go to The Future of Children‘s volume on Children and Electronic Media.

Monday’s New York Times cites The Future of Children as an Example of Resurgence of Research on Culture and Poverty

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In Monday’s front page article of The New York Times, Patricia Cohen cites The Future of Children: Fragile Families journal as an example of the resurgence and recent acceptance of research around culture and poverty.

Fragile families, defined as couples who are unmarried when their children are born, face greater economic and stability risks, which can endanger child wellbeing. The Future of Children volume, based on the nine year longitudinal fragile families study and other research explores the increase in the number of fragile families over the past fifty years and the ramifications of this reality, and recommends policies to ensure child wellbeing.

A key finding of the fragile family study is that contrary to popular perception, most unmarried parents are together at the time of their child’s birth. However, just a few years later many have broken up and are no longer co-parenting in a healthy manner. Policy makers and practitioners who focus on these parents later in the child’s life may have missed a “magic moment” – the child’s birth – at which parents can be given services to shore up their relationship and learn critical co-parenting and relationship skills.

Based on this central finding, five steps to strengthen fragile families are recommended:

  1. Support the three T’s: Treat early, Treat often, and Treat together. In other words, treat couples when they are together at the time of their child’s birth, provide lots of services at that time, and treat as the family that they are.
  2. Decrease the number of nonmarital births by “going to scale” with sexual education programs and resources. Most parents in the fragile families study had their first child as teens so preventing that first young birth would go a long way to reducing the number of children exposed to the break-up of their parents and the instability created when their parents date in search of new partners.
  3. Increase union stability and father involvement in fragile families by building on and perhaps modifying marriage-education programs that have shown to be successful with middle class families.
  4. Redesign tax and transfer programs so that children not only have access to high-quality services, but that benefits are not cut or reduced if parents marry or live together.
  5. Develop and rigorously evaluate new demonstrations in the areas of how postsecondary education and penal policy affect the lives of fragile families.

For a summary of the volume, full journal, and complementary policy brief, please go to: http://www.princeton.edu/futureofchildren/publications/journals/.

NYT Article about Extended Transition to Adulthood Misses Critical Issues about Disadvantaged Young People

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A recent New York Times Magazine article about today’s 20-something’s has gone viral, with countless electronically connected young people circulating the story about how their cohort is changing all the rules when it comes to transitioning to adulthood. They are in a sort of limbo, "forestalling the beginning of adult life," as they extend their schooling, jump between career paths, and delay marriage and childbearing. This article notes some of the cultural forces feeding this trend: a sluggish job market and the increasing need for post-secondary education in today’s workforce are two major reasons for the shift. But the article misses a critical part of the story: how have these changes affected low-income, disadvantaged young adults?

In fact, this elongated transition worsens already existing disparities between disadvantaged youth and their more educated, higher income counterparts.

Covered in detail in the latest volume of The Future of Children, the shift from childhood to full adulthood places great strain on both young people and their families. Although governmental programs provide some support for disadvantaged children, the burden falls primarily on private institutions or interpersonal networks for those 18 and older. Across the income spectrum, parents are spending about ten percent of their income to support young adult children, but ten percent of a lower or middle class income provides fewer opportunities than a comparable portion of an upper-middle or upper class family salary. Moreover, for a family already struggling financially, providing for an adult child can be very stressful.

More affluent parents may help children by offering them rent-free housing, monetary support, or a potential safety net while the children experiment with low-paying jobs or unpaid internships. In addition, they can help emerging adults establish themselves by providing loans or assistance towards buying a car or house. Such assets help young adults build up capital and transition more smoothly into stable careers and family life. Less wealthy parents may not be able to provide their children with the same advantages without incurring major costs. Their resources are more limited and available money may be less reliable from year-to-year. As a result, these more disadvantaged children may fall even further behind their peers.

In addition, parents assist their children by connecting them to other networks of support, including people who may help them advance their careers and institutions that facilitate transitions. One such institution is college. Private colleges, more heavily populated by more affluent youth, tend to offer extensive support to help students develop at least partial autonomy, such as on-campus housing, extensive activities and entertainment, adult and peer support, health care, and counseling or other resources to guide students into jobs and post-college life. Community colleges, which are more in reach for many lower-income families, offer their students far less support and far fewer opportunities, thus deepening disadvantages.

Another trend widening the gap between young people is the timing of having children. While young people spanning the socioeconomic range are marrying later, less affluent young people are forming families while still in their late teens and early twenties, often outside of marriage. The responsibilities that accompany parenthood – from medical needs to childcare – pose additional challenges to completing an education and maintaining a steady job. To make matters worse, many young, unmarried parents break up shortly after their child is born, and young mothers often turn to their own mothers for help. Middle and upper class youth that wait until married with a stable career to have children are much better equipped to handle these additional costs and demands without relying on overburdened families. Without parents or public programs that can assist them, more disadvantaged youth continue to struggle with the assumption of adult roles.

As this widely-experienced yet new phase of maturation becomes more studied and understood, effort needs to be made to make sure that those emerging adults who are already disadvantaged – from impoverished families, with weak family ties, exiting foster care, requiring special education, or leaving the juvenile justice system – do not fall further behind. Whether by expanding social services beyond age eighteen or increasing the counseling and lifestyle support aspects of community college, society must help provide 20-somethings the assistance they need to transition into healthy, productive adult lives.

Financial Aid and Counseling Increase Community College Completion

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In a recent New York Times article, experts conclude that an academic post-secondary experience may not be for everyone and that for some youth, vocational training might be a better fit. While access to and preparation for college remain important goals for many youth, Bob Lerman suggests that more emphasis should be put on high school, post-secondary, and apprenticeship programs to give some options to youth who do not pursue college but still must be prepared to enter the workforce. Community colleges are one place that offers vocational training programs.
While enrollment in such programs has gone up in recent years, however, an article in The Future of Children’s issue on Transition to Adulthood points out that many students struggle to stay in school and attain degrees and certificates. Students often face competing pressures on their time, such as work and family obligations, and these institutions often lack adequate resources to support such students.
More research needs to be done on how to best assist students, but a couple areas that seem promising are better, more personal counseling and more effective provision of financial aid. Early results from a randomized control trial of struggling students at a community college in California showed that a mandatory program on skills such as time management and note-taking coupled with counseling and tutoring requirements boosted academic performance and course credits earned. Some less rigorous evaluations also suggest that individualized programs helping students adjust to the demands of community college increased their success.
Financial aid studies have looked at both sources providing money upon enrollment and those offering stipends as rewards for achievement once in school. Recent legislation has increased the maximum size of Pell grants, federal payments toward education based on family need. However, application for these grants and other student aid requires the FAFSA, a complicated financial form. . A recent study offered randomly selected families help completing the form, and students in these families were more likely to enroll in college and received larger financial aid packages. This suggests that simplification of, and assistance with this process could benefit families for whom finances are a major obstacle for secondary education.
Other programs have looked into how to keep students in school and improve their performance while there. Scientifically rigorous trials at a community college in Louisiana and a four-year public university in Canada showed significant improvements in grades and persistence when students were offered financial benefits conditional on maintaining reasonably high grades. These suggest a reward system could keep students on the path toward certificate or diploma completion.

Many more students are enrolling in higher education programs, particular community colleges, than have in the past. The skills taught and certificates and degrees obtained can increase their earnings and employability, particularly if they stay in school longer. New evaluations continue to provide insight into how to further these goals, but we can start by offering more support services and simplifying the financial aid process.

FOC Research Supports Supreme Court Decision Rejecting Life without Parole for Juvenile Offenders

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Yesterday’sSupreme Court decision, banning sentences of life without parole for juvenile offenders who have not committed murder, was right on. As our volume Juvenile Justice demonstrates, over a decade of social science research has demonstrated that adolescents lack the emotional and mental maturity of adults and this needs to be considered when making decisions about culpability and punishment.

Compared to adults, adolescents are impulsive, short-sighted, and easily influenced by peers. In general, they do not think ahead, and they are unduly influenced by the potential rewards of risky decisions and less concerned about potential costs. Most crimes committed by juveniles are impulsive, stupid, non-violent acts that occur when they are with their friends, not calculated decisions that are well thought through.
Therefore, punitive policies often do not deter juveniles from crime because the same factors that lead adolescents to commit crimes in the first place make them less likely to be deterred by punitive sanctions. To be deterred by the prospect of a long sentence, or incarceration, or transfer into the adult system, a teenager needs to think long-term, like an adult. This is not to say that juvenile offenders should be not held accountable for their crimes. They absolutely should – but in a way that recognizes the offenders’ youth and gives them a second chance. Life without parole for non-homicide offenses does not take into account that juvenile criminals may well mature into law abiding adults with the proper treatment and interventions. To refuse to offer these and lock teens up for life is indeed cruel and unusual punishment.

New Census Measure Provides More Detailed View of Poverty

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The U.S. Census Bureau recently announced plans to publish a new poverty measure in conjunction with the traditional measure, a move that can shed additional light on vulnerable populations and how current policies are serving them. While the new measure will not replace the current one in policies and determining program eligibility and funding, it will reveal a more nuanced view of the experience of lower-income Americans.
The standard measure, first published in 1964 as part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, calculates a federal poverty threshold based on food expenditures as determined by the “thrifty food plan” developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The measure is quite simple; it presumes that food expenditures should make up a third a household’s budget, so it simply multiplies the amount allowed under the thrifty food plan by three. Families are considered poor if their household income falls below this level. While the threshold has been continually adjusted to account for inflation, it does not account for regional differences. Even more problematic is that over the past half-century food prices have dropped relative to expenses such as housing; given that housing costs have soared since the 1960’s, the current measure does not accurately capture the financial strain of some families.
The new measure is based on different calculations of necessary spending and family resources. Household spending includes the costs of food, housing, utilities, and clothing, as well as a little bit extra. Family resources include not only income, but also in-kind benefits such as food stamps. The resource measure also subtracts taxes and tax credits, work expenses such as commuting costs and childcare, and out-of-pocket medical expenses to represent the family’s actual ability to cover the expenses listed above. This more accurate and thorough measure acknowledges the complexity of resources and spending, and it allows for geographic adjustment such as greater costs in places with more expensive housing.
Scheduled to be released annually starting in fall 2011, this new measure will help policy evaluation in three major ways. First, it will help determine if all vulnerable populations are being reached. Second, by including additional measures of needs and resources, researchers and policy makers can better analyze whether assistance programs are mitigating families’ experiences of poverty, such as the difference food stamps make to a family. Third, the measure will show how much necessary expenses add to a family’s burden. By extending beyond food costs to include housing, out-of-pocket medical expenses, and utilities, policy makers can identify areas where the poor need the most help to fulfill their families’ needs.
As explored in an issue of The Future of Children that focuses on antipoverty policies, these types of governmental assistance for child care, health care, and education are critical for needy families. The Census’s new poverty measure allows a new insight into these issues and interventions and can provide a powerful new tool for analysis in the coming years.

For more details, see the federal government’s working group report from March 2010: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/povmeas/SPM_TWGObservations.pdf

Accountability from Teachers Union Can Spark Reform

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A recent Op-Ed in the New York Times and a Boston news radio program covered Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and her proposal for how the union can evaluate teachers more thoroughly. She addressed topics sensitive among many teachers – the use of student performance as a factor in evaluations and the procedures to remove teachers who are ineffective or guilty of misconduct. Breaking with precedent, Weingarten favors using student test scores to assess teachers and agrees that steps to remove ineffective teachers should be eased.

The AFT’s support for these reforms is a positive step in a complicated process. An article in The Future of Children volume Excellence in the Classroom focuses on the role of teachers, and it argues that unions, school administrators, and policymakers should work together to reform school systems. “Reform bargaining” has gained traction in recent years, with the support of both AFT and another major union, the National Education Association (NEA).

“Reform bargaining” was illustrated by the Toledo, Ohio, school district in the early 1980s, when the union and policy makers designed a program to improve teachers’ effectiveness. Under that plan, the first year of teaching was treated as a “trial year.” More experienced but ineffective teachers were required to enter an intervention program, after which even tenured faculty members were let go if they did not show sufficient improvement. The union evaluated the teachers, investing itself fully in the program and helping it succeed. The national ventures promoted by AFT president Weingarten closely reflect this initiative.

Although holding teachers more accountable is a good start, policies linking teachers to student performance must be carefully constructed. Schools may have vastly different student populations, resources, and administrative situations, all of which can create barriers to student achievement, so teacher performance must be viewed in context. Second, educators are concerned that faculty will teach to standardized tests, narrowing content covered in class and giving more superficial treatment to topics, resulting in students being less able to apply and connect material more broadly. These factors make it important to use caution in rating teachers by student achievement, including making it only one component of a broader evaluation.

Research from the FOC volume supports the type of reform recently embraced by AFT, but these measures are only the start of true education reform. Policy makers must work with teachers to clearly articulate goals for teacher quality and to devote resources toward achieving them. Flexibility, peer review, and attention to student needs are key components in this process. The AFT’s movement toward greater accountability must now be met with further commitments by both teachers’ unions and administrators.