Combined with a decline in divorce, this trend meant that most single mothers and most fathers owing child support had never been married. The percentage of births to unwed parents in the United States began to rise around 1960, and by the late 1990s, about 35 percent of all children were born to unmarried parents. They have also offered numerous data workshops that help graduate students and early-career researchers learn about the great potential of the study." "The investigators have not only made it a priority to make the data readily available. "The Fragile Families study has inspired numerous new scholars - in sociology, demography, economics, psychology and the biomedical sciences - to focus their research on child wellbeing," said Christina Paxson, president of Brown University, who was a principal investigator on the study during her time on the Princeton faculty. Princeton students often use the data for their senior theses. The data have been used in more than 550 articles in peer-reviewed journals, 46 books and book chapters, 85 dissertations, and more than 80 working papers. More than 6,000 researchers have accessed the project's publicly available data. The Fragile Families data, which cover a diverse group of families with many from disadvantaged backgrounds, have also proven important to researchers studying a wide range of related topics.
In short, the story was 'high hopes and low capabilities.'"Īs compared with children born to married parents, those born to unmarried parents have lower scores on cognitive tests, more mental health problems and more physical health problems such as asthma and obesity, even after taking account of differences in their families' economic resources. A large proportion of the fathers - nearly 40 percent - had spent some time in jail or prison. "At the same time, over a third of these parents had not finished high school, and only 3 percent had a college degree. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, director of Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, and principal investigator for the Fragile Families study.
"Most of these unmarried parents wanted to marry and had 'high hopes' for a future together at the time of their child's birth," said Sara McLanahan, the William S. Results of the research have painted a detailed - and worrisome - portrait of these unmarried parents and their children. Using that information and data on a control group of children born to married parents, the Fragile Families study has played a foundational role in helping researchers understand the capabilities and deficits of unmarried parents and the challenges faced by their children. The study has gathered information on the children's physical and mental health, cognitive function, social-emotional skills, schooling and living conditions, as well as the makeup, stability and financial resources of their families.
cities from their birth in the last years of the 20th century well into adolescence. These projects and many others have been made possible by the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study - a research project based at Princeton and Columbia University that has built an unmatched trove of data by following 3,700 children born to unwed parents in large U.S. And researchers at Stony Brook University are examining what affects sleep patterns among such teenagers. On the second floor of Lewis Thomas Lab at Princeton University, researchers are working to better understand the complex interactions between environmental conditions and human DNA.Īt the University of Michigan, researchers are using magnetic resonance imaging to study the brains of adolescents from disadvantaged backgrounds.
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