Family Complexity among Children in the United States

Abstract

Researchers largely have relied on a measure of family structure to describe children’s living arrangements, but this approach captures only the child’s relationship to the parent(s), ignoring the presence and composition of siblings. We develop a measure of family complexity that merges family structure and sibling composition to distinguish between simple two-biological-parent families, families with complex-sibling (half or stepsiblings) arrangements, and complex-parent (stepparent, single-parent) families. Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we provide a descriptive profile of changes in children’s living arrangements over a 13-year span (1996–2009). SIPP sample sizes are sufficiently large to permit an evaluation of changes in the distribution of children in various (married, cohabiting, and single-parent) simple and complex families according to race/ethnicity and parental education. The article concludes by showing that we have reached a plateau in family complexity and that complexity is concentrated among the most disadvantaged families.

Family Complexity and the Stress Process in Prison: How Sibling Living Arrangements of Minor Children Influence Maternal Role Strains

“…These directions may yield insight into key life-course concerns that influence both stability and change in children's lives (Fomby and Cherlin 2007;Sampson and Laub 1993). Research on the dynamics of sibling living arrangements would be consistent with Manning et al's research on family complexity in children's lives in other contexts (Manning et al 2014). These dynamic directions may further the understanding of family complexity in relation to mass imprisonment and its association with the well-being of highly-marginalized women and their families (Sykes and Pettit 2014).…”

Change in the Stability of Marital and Cohabiting Unions Following the Birth of a Child

“…We found stable or declining shares of women with a child from a previous relationship. Associations were generally modest between our indicators of family complexity and union instability, in all suggesting a small role of family complexity in accounting for changes in union stability over time-smaller than we expected based on recent attention to family complexity and its potential link to the subsequent life course (e.g., Carlson and Furstenberg 2006;Guzzo and Furstenberg 2007a, b;Lichter and Qian 2008; but see Manning et al 2014).…”

Do Young Mothers and Fathers Differ in the Likelihood of Returning Home?

“…Yet another wrinkle emerges if the G1 generation has other children (minor or adult) living at home; these would be the G2 generation’s siblings and could represent a draw on household resources or a potential source of support. The emerging body of research on family complexity has largely looked at “horizontal” complexity (sibling ties) or two-generation complexity (stepparents and stepchildren) (Manning, Brown, & Stykes, 2014), but family complexity can also emerge – and be quite fluid – based on multigenerational ties and coresidence. Further, family structure instability has been associated with poorer outcomes for children (Cavanagh & Huston, 2008), and there is evidence that these multigenerational families were similarly unstable (Dunifon, Ziol-Guest, & Kopka, 2014).…”