Policy makers and others are concerned that many young men today are only loosely attached to their children and their children’s mothers. This concern has been fueled by rising rates of non-marital childbearing, delays in the age of marriage, increases in the share of children being raised in impoverished female-headed families, and the failure of some biological fathers to provide economic support to their children. There is recognition that these shifts in family life are linked to shifts in the labor force participation of men and women. For example, several analysts have suggested that the observed phenomena can be partially explained by declines in young men’s ability to establish and maintain stable career trajectories (Anderson 1990; Oppenheimer et al. 1997). Sorting out the interconnections between employment and family patterns is complex because individuals typically make a number of transitions as they move out of their teen years into their twenties. These transitions are often packaged or occur together and include school completion and entry into the labor market, entry into romantic unions of various kinds, and the occurrence of pregnancies and births. Surprisingly little descriptive work has been done since Rindfuss (1991) documented the complexity and density of the transitions that occur as teenagers grow up in the U.S.
this project will use a life course perspective informed by economic theory to address the challenging issue of how young men's transitions into fatherhood, stable unions, and employment are sequenced and linked. Our focus will be on the first transition into biological fatherhood in conjunction with the other transitions that often occur at this stage in the life course: completing education, entry into the labor force, and entry into stable unions. The analyses will focus on describing what the sequences of these transitions are among young men and explore the reciprocal effects of transitions into work, marriage, and cohabitation on the timing of the transition into biological fatherhood.
A multidisciplinary team of researchers will examine this issue using nationally representative longitudinal data sets including The National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health), the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), the National Survey of Adolescent Males (NSAM), the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH). These surveys include samples of young men at different ages during different time periods.
The project has three specific aims:
1) To describe the normative sequences of these various and interrelated work and family transitions for different subgroups of young men.
2) To model the effects of workforce and romantic union milestones on entry into first births.
3) To examine contextual, cohort and gender differences in the sequencing of these transitions and in the effects of partnership and employment on parenthood.
