Cohabitation, Child Wellbeing & Parental Investments

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The multi-year research plan includes three separate studies related to family structure, joint parental resources and early child wellbeing. The first quantifies the prevalence and co-occurrence of parental psychological (e.g., depression) and socioeconomic (e.g., unemployment) risk factors across married, cohabiting, and single parents and will assess the implications for parents' joint economic and behavioral investment in children's development. The second study considers whether marital and residency status| moderate the impact of parents' joint psychological resources on children's cognitive and behavioral adjustment and whether economic resources (e.g., income) or behavioral investments (e.g., parenting quality) explain these interactions. The third study considers a form of parental investment not often considered by psychologists - time investments in caregiving. Here, the time fathers invest in caregiving versus working or leisure are examined as a function of fathers' relationship to the child's mother (married, cohabiting or nonresident) and his economic resources. Models will be constructed using three new, nationally representative datasets that are extremely well suited to theoretically and methodologically interdisciplinary work and to the specific questions posed here: The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project (EHS), and the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). Each study gathered information on fathers' psychological risk and/or behavioral investments in addition to mothers', enabling an examination of the joint contribution of parental investments in children as well as fathers' unique contribution. Additionally, FFCWS and EHS are unique in that they offer large at-risk samples with data on early child outcomes. With detailed, nationally representative data on daily time use, the ATUS allows for a more nuanced assessment of parental time investment in young children across family types than has ever been done before.