Remise en couple de la mère et devenir de l’enfant entre 5 et 9 ans - Maternal Re-Partnering, Parenting, and Child Development

Maternal re-partnering through (re)marriage or cohabitation is an increasingly common experience for young children. Yet, both the pathways through which social father families are formed and they ages at which children experience maternal re-partnering are diverse. Additionally, relatively little is known about how different family structure experiences related to maternal re-partnering may influence the parenting behaviors to which children are exposed or children’s subsequent development. Such knowledge has important implications for understanding how public policy may promote child wellbeing in the context of recent increases in nonmarital childbearing and cohabitation, and related high rates of family and residential instability.
In this paper, we take advantage of newly available data from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study and use Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) to examine the influence of maternal re-partnering (the formation of a cohabiting or marital union with a social father) during the first nine years of children’s lives on trajectories in maternal parenting behaviors and child cognitive skills and behavior problems. We pay careful attention to the timing (age) at which such transitions occur and assess their influence on parenting behaviors and child outcomes both immediately and over subsequent survey waves. This approach provides important information about whether any effects of maternal re-partnering vary by child developmental stage as well as whether they are constant, attenuated, or exacerbated over time. Furthermore, we examine these associations net of the effects of other types of familial instability that children whose mothers re-partner are likely to have experienced, such as the divorce or separation of their married or cohabiting biological parents. Because HLM allows us to identify effects of changes in maternal partnership status on changes in child outcomes, our modeling strategy serves to reduce bias from unobserved persistent characteristics. Furthermore, we incorporate in our models "falsification tests" which further reduce potential selection bias by adjusting for initial differences in child outcomes that are associated with subsequent maternal re-partnering (or the absence thereof).
Preliminary findings suggest that single mothers who re-partner during early years of their child’s life exhibit increased psychological aggression and punitive discipline, and decreased emotional responsiveness toward the child, relative to mothers who remain single. These effects do not appear to dissipate over time and, in some cases. worsen as the child ages. Breaking up with a new partner and re-partnering with a second is associated with further increases in punitive discipline by a mother. Turning to child cognitive skills and behavior problems, maternal re-partnering is associated with increased aggressive behaviors, but is not associated with withdrawn or anxious behaviors. In addition, aggressive behaviors often continue to increase over time across multiple periods following the re-partnership. Differences in cognitive skills by maternal re-partnering status are predominately explained the characteristics of the individuals selecting into single-mother and social-father families, and any immediate effects associated with maternal re-partnering appear to fade out over time. This research has implications for informing policies related to marriage and family formation as well as for designing programs to promote child wellbeing in complex families.