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Cohabitation and Children's Living Arrangements: New Estimates from the United States
Sheela Kennedy, Ph.D., Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota
| What | MPC Seminar Series |
|---|---|
| When |
October 08, 2007 12:15 PM
October 08, 2007 01:15 PM
October 08, 2007 from 12:15 pm to 01:15 pm |
| Contact Email | mpc@umn.edu |
| Contact Phone | 612-624-8806 |
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ABSTRACT: We use the 1995 and 2002 waves of the National Survey of Family Growth to examine recent trends in cohabitation in the United States. We find that women’s cohabitation experience continued to grow rapidly during the 1990s. By the late 1990s, the large majority of first unions and first marriages were entered through cohabitation, and the duration of first cohabiting unions increased noticeably. Children’s experience of cohabitation also increased during the 1990s: forty percent of all children will spend some time in a cohabiting family by age 14; nearly half through birth to cohabiting parents. Because of data limitations we are unable to produce new estimates of the impact of increased cohabitation on children’s experience of parent’s marital dissolution and single-parent family life. Nonetheless, our results point to the steady growth of cohabitation and to the complex and potentially changing role of cohabitation in U.S. family life.
The National Children's Study: Design and measurement issues